July 2012
28 posts
With Aurora, Another Mass Killing Shocks America.... →
So given the regularity and predictability of these calamities, why the recurrent shock? It seems that assumptions about the perpetrators of gun violence, their motivations and their victims are in constant need of being reset. If Holmes had been Muslim, we would now be talking about radical Islam; if he was undocumented, we would be talking about electrifying a 2,000-mile fence; if he was...
Airigami: the art of folding air
Vincent van Gogh used paint. Auguste Rodin worked in bronze. Larry Moss shapes air with the use of balloons. And why not? His series of old masterworks might be a blow up, but it’s surely a lovely and very creative one!
June 24, 2011 | New Art | by Nini Baseema|
Boat people un-Christian? Wrong, Mr Abbott
“Tony Abbott says that boat people are “un-Christian” for coming to Australia the way they do.
Specifically, he said:
“I don’t think it’s a very Christian thing to come in by the back door rather than the front door. … I think the people we accept should be coming the right way and not the wrong way. … If you pay a people-smuggler, if you jump...
Turbans on the Runway: What does it mean for...
Asking some important questions:
“First, there is obviously a lot of excitement about this in the Sikh community. And perhaps with good reason. So rarely are we Sikhs represented positively (if at all) in popular culture in the United States (or in India) that even non-Sikh models wearing paghs on the runway seems like a milestone. So often are our turbans the target of discrimination,...
The Queen and ‘Our’ Glorious Empire | Black... →
“The British Empire was a terrible entity and as such, the wholesale nostalgia trip we are being forced to embark this weekend is all the more troubling when you remember that for many around the world, as head of the British Commonwealth, the Queen remains the primary symbol of British imperialism. Spanning the late 16th century to its height in the 19th and 20th, ‘our’ empire played an...
The Fourth of July and my American son | Gary... →
“This is what I’ve always found both impressive and enraging about American patriotism. I love its flexibility – the notion that however problematic majorities of every race, ethnicity and religion found a place for themselves in the national story. The trouble is that story all too often slips from a celebration of shared citizenship to a proclamation of genius – as though being an American...
The New Elitists - NYTimes.com →
“And so if elites have a culture today, it is a culture of individual self-cultivation. Their rhetoric emphasizes such individualism and the talents required to “make it.” Yet there is something pernicious about this self-presentation. The narrative of openness and talent obscures the bitter truth of the American experience. Talents are costly to develop, and we refuse to socialize these...
9/11 stole my whiteness - Opinion - Al Jazeera... →
“I shifted a little bit: now I was an American, if not necessarily wholly white. I would make speeches to my British friends about how they did not understand that in the United States, unlike in the UK, you could be fully accepted and have a funny name. In order to hang on to my own sense of privilege and belonging, I was now erasing histories of racial oppression in the US, purveying...
“In The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde a powerful black feminist writes: “Looking...”
– Racism? Sexism? But What’s your Politics? « Unsettling Settlers
m.guardian.co.uk →
“So what, you may think. Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas is a kid’s film, with no particular pretensions to literary-historical accuracy, and in any case people have always messed about with the tales of the Arabian Nights, not least the many authors of the tales themselves. Sinbad is a recognisable part of what we might call a Hollywood pantheon, and there’s no need to get po-faced about...
Watchvia dericaTwo of my favourite people.
Sunil Janah, Who Chronicled India in Photographs,...
“Mr. Janah documented India’s ethnic and religious diversity, as well as important events in the country’s modern history, both before and immediately after it achieved independence in 1947. In an era when photographers faced many technical disadvantages, he started with a Kodak Box Brownie and did not use a Nikon until the 1980s.
His photographs of the famine, published in People’s War,...
“If you tell students, future workers, that they should be ‘flexible,’ to expect...”
– Nina Power | Dangerous Subjects: UK Students and the Criminalization of Protest, SAQ, Duke UP (via derica)
The solace of solitude
”Aloneness can have a vast restorative power; there’s something spiritual and consoling to it. It’s space for your mind to uncurl. Those poor, restless souls who draw no comfort from solitude; I wish them the gift of solace from it. I’m all at sea, lost, if time by myself can’t be carved from the great cram of everything else. And then, in the lovely, glittery alone, a door opens to...
Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes...
