And I Thought Spanish Civil War-Themed Video Games Were Tasteless

I thought I had seen the limit when I read about the Spanish Civil War-Themed video game (see earlier post under "Memory and Amnesia")

And I knew I should have logged out of the Reuters news site and sashayed over to my new sofa to watch that fascist asshole Giuliani get trounced in Florida. But no. The promise of schadenfreude wasn't enough. Curiosity got the better of me. And so I read with disbelief: "Holocaust-Themed Carnival Float Causes Strain."

According to the article, the Viradouro samba school has created a float depicting piles of dead bodies as part of their broader program related to "shock." There is a photo in the article but I find it so nauseating that I cannot upload it here. The samba school folks seem aggrieved to know that they have offended Jewish people in Brazil. (and obviously it offends any person, anywhere, who learns of this)

Here is a quote from the article:


"Viradouro's parade theme is "Shockers" and it includes floats depicting the shock of birth, the shock of horror and the shock of cold. Barros said the Holocaust float would be the only one without dancers on top. "If we had people dancing on top of dead bodies that would indeed be disrespectful," he told Reuters"


I love how the representative of the Samba school, a Mr. Barros, deems himself to be the arbiter of where to draw boundaries between good and bad taste. And so according to him women in sequin-trimmed bras and g-strings gyrating on top of the holocaust-themed float would be in poor taste. But not the float itself.


Here is the link:
http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSN2955554720080129?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0

FOLLOW UP Feb. 1

A judge barred the samba school from taking out the float, and from bringing out a dancer dressed as Adolf Hitler. I just love how the guy from the samba school who claimed they were being respectful by not dancing on top of the float depicting dead bodies of holocaust victims omitted the detail that a dancer dressed as the Nazi dictator would be accompanying the float.

http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSN3131385820080131?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0&sp=true

http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSN3131385820080131?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0&sp=true

El Chupacabra Found on Mars?

Most Tasteless Typo of 2008

A friend alerted me to this most unfortunate typo in a Yahoo News headline from a few days ago. And for once I will refrain from all other comment:

Source YAHOO.COM
http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20080128/wl_csm/okidnap

U.S. woman abducted in Afghanistan. A Taliban snatch?

By Jon Boone
Mon Jan 28, 3:00 AM ET
The abduction on Saturday of a female US aid worker in one of Afghanistan's most dangerous cities may signal increased risk for foreign aid workers.

Kidnappings of Americans have been rare, and some Kandahar residents say the abduction of Cyd Mizell and her Afghan driver at gunpoint is a worrying development.

Sarah Chayes, a former journalist who now runs an Afghan cooperative that exports soap, says the incident "sends a signal. It's like a new chapter in a book."

"They haven't taken an American or a Canadian on the streets like this before. I don't think this was just bandits because the operation looks like it was too sophisticated for that."

Ms. Chayes suggests that the abduction could have been payback for US policy on President Pervez Musharraf.

Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban movement, has been rocked by the neo-Taliban insurgency that has gained strength in the past three years. The deterioration of law and order has also made the city considerably more dangerous for foreign visitors and Afghans alike.

The most recent abduction case involved four members of the International Committee of the Red Cross in the eastern province of Wardak in September. The two Afghans, a Macedonian, and a Burmese citizen were freed three days later. Perhaps the most notorious case of 2007 was the abduction of 23 Christian aid workers from South Korea who attempted to travel from Kabul to Kandahar by bus. Two hostages were shot to death before the rest were released. An American civilian was briefly abducted in Kabul in April 2005 but escaped by throwing himself from a moving car.

Analysts fear that terrorists and criminal gangs have been encouraged by the policy of some foreign governments to pay ransoms.

The few foreigners who still live in the city of Kandahar often use heavy security, including armed guards and armor-plated vehicles, whenever they ventured out of their offices. Afghan officials say that Mizell had been wearing a burqa, an all-encompassing body veil favoured by most Afghan women when they have to go out of their homes.

Ms. Mizell worked for Asian Life Development Foundation, a little-known nongovernmental organization . The group said she had been working in Kandahar for nearly three years with women and on income generation projects.

A speaker of Pashtu, the main language of Afghanistan's south, she taught English at Kandahar University and gave embroidery lessons at a girls' school.

In response to the abduction, local police increased their presence on the streets of Kandahar over the weekend and the Ministry of the Interior said it was doing all it could to find Ms. Mizell. Local police said that they had not been contacted by anyone claiming responsibility for the kidnapping.

The Taliban have employed kidnapping as a tactic in their battle to erode popular support for the government of President Hamid Karzai several times before.

Zabihullah Mujahed, the Taliban's main spokesman, said they did not know if anyone affiliated with the extremist Sunni group had been responsible for the abduction.

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Miss Catalunya

Yesterday I read about a newish pageant that made my day: Miss and Mister Catalunya. Like Puerto Rico, the Catalan region of Spain has decided to expand its claims to nationhood through that tried and true mechanism: the beauty pageant. Fabulous! Under Franco (as had also been the case under some of Spain's kings), the Catalan language was illegal, and after the imposition of democracy, long-held claims to nationhood were revived. Many Catalans would like to be a separate (republican) nation, but right now they are an autonomous region with a number of special financial and other rights negotiated with Madrid. The area is officially bilingual, with a preference for Catalan.

I wonder if my family's region is included in the area covered by the pageant, since in their revisionist political program, many Catalans go back to the middle ages and reinterpret the area then ruled by a count as a nation that should be reconstituted today, and ruled from Barcelona. Then they expand this area based on cultural and linguistic similitude, to propose an imperialist program incorporating regions other than Catalonia like Valencia. Some of those regions don't want to be included and believe their language is their own, rather than a "dialect" of Catalan. As if there is such a thing as cultural purity that can be "recuperated" anyway. The Catalan spoken now after a "linguistic normalization" has little to do with the local variants spoken and sometimes written all over the region for hundreds of years. So it's all very complicated and now we have a beauty pageant! I hope I get to see it one day.


















CATALUÑA TAMBIÉN BUSCA LA INDEPENDENCIA EN LOS CONCURSOS DE BELLEZA
Nueva Miss para la 'nació catalana'
-1. El certamen ha elegido a una representante que competirá en Miss Europa Latina
-1. Algunas de las concursantes dicen que 'nunca' se presentarían a Miss España
Ésta es la segunda vez que se celebra este particular concurso

Actualizado lunes 14/01/2008 13:55 (CET)
HECTOR MARÍN

CASTELLDEFELS (BARCELONA).- Faltaba poco para que la representante del Barcelonès fuera coronada Miss Nació catalana 2008 -un concurso que sólo se había celebrado una vez antes y que permite acudir con representación propia al certamen Miss Europa Latina-, y su rostro rezumaba concentración.

Patricia Ruiz, estudiante de tercer curso de Ingeniería aeronáutica en la UPC, premiaba su nuevo peinado, el quinto de la noche, con una sincera sonrisa a su peluquera. La joven de Sarrià, 22 años de belleza y simpatía, se sabía ganadora, y asumía con elegancia la distancia sobre el resto. Cataluña tiene una nueva 'pubilla' que de mayor quiere ser astronauta.
A las puertas del éxito quedaron las representantes de El Garraf (Jana Pérez), Ribera d'Ebre (Sandra Avila) y el Baix Llobregat (Verónica Barrones). A pesar de que Cataluña cuenta con 41 comarcas, sólo 26 chicas, con poca experiencia, tomaron parte del concurso.

En contra de lo anunciado, la clase política apenas ha estado representada por una concejal convergente del Ayuntamiento de Castelldefels, localidad que ha acogido una gala falta de ritmo y cuya presentación ha rayado la vulgaridad.

En hombres, Gerard Téllez, preparador físico barcelonés de 26 años, es el nuevo guaperas de Cataluña. "El único que nos llevaríamos", ha sentenciado un representante de Mister España presente en el acto.

¿Y cómo es la catalana de 2008? "Somos guapas por nuestra naturalidad; dulces pero estamos prevenidas; sacrificadas", definía Cristina, representante del Vallès Occidental. "Somos finas, sensuales, sencillas y elegantes; nada que ver con la chica sexy latina", apostilla Alba Mestre, candidata del Vallès Oriental, estudiante de arquitectura.
Ha sido un concurso catalán -aunque no nacionalista, según el organizador, Alberto Márquez- en el que se hablaba mucho en castellano. Al menos en los camerinos. "Claro que me gustaría ser Mister España", exclama Cristian, un joven búlgaro representante de la Vall d'Aran.

Sin embargo, unas pocas chicas "nunca" se presentarían a Miss España: "A pesar de que tiene mayor proyección, no iría porque no me siento española", afirma Sara Vila, representante del Alt Empordà. "No tengo nada que ver con la belleza de las andaluzas o las madrileñas", abundaba Cristina, quien quería "representar a mi país" porque "debe una sentirse identificada con Cataluña" para participar en este concurso. "Y eso no ha pasado".

Mientras, dos participantes de origen rumano bromeaban en el camerino."¿Por qué no puede ser Miss Cataluña una rumana?", reivindicaba Alina, 19 años, representante de la comarca de El Montsià.

http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2008/01/13/barcelona/1200220901.html

"In Spain, a Monumental Silence"

Rather than keeping to his subjects of considerable expertise, art reviews and kvetching about the ethical quagmire museums have become, Michael Kimmelman weighs in on the debate about historical memory, surviving Franco-era monuments and restitution for victims of the dictatorship. He takes the Right-wing line and falls into the trap of moral equivalence. It's revelatory that he chooses to interview Blas Pinar, head of a fascist hard-line group, and then to pretend to objectivity he also speaks to the author of the brilliant book "Memory and Amnesia of the Spanish Civil War," Paloma Aguilar. I did not know that like me she is in her forties and the grandchild of a Republican. So I did learn something, besides the fact that Kimmelman is right-wing of course. There are so many objectionable things in this article that I don't know where to begin. Unearth the past and then erase it, Kimmelman sanctimoniusly intones, but what about the erasures symbolic and literal carried out by Franco from the inception of his coup in July 1936 until his death in 1975. As Kimmelman himself notes it's closest to "don't ask don't tell."

Why is it so difficult for many to grasp that for many of us it is extremely problematic (to use understatement) to broker a transition to democracy that leaves state terror, genocide and literally mass graves buried? Why is it so difficult for many to understand that many question the oft-invoked excuse for refusal to discuss what remains to be done which is that doing so will create social upheaval. I know it's easy for my generation to judge my parents' generation and that I was a child so I did not directly experience the worst part of the dictatorship, nor did I grasp the fear that gripped the country after Franco died and it was unclear what type of a regime would emerge. Most crucially, I was only 14 when the attempted military coup of 1981 happened and since I didn't live through the worst of Franco's regime, could not understand the horror and terror that must have been felt by people thinking that the repression would be reinstated. But now it's 2008, and time is running out. Kimmelman barely touches upon the widespread trauma and fear that still drives people to hold back information, as more and more survivors die taking this data with them.

Perversely grandchildren are accused of "trying to fix blame." Would people attack Jews for "trying to fix blame" on Germany and other countries that collaborated? Would people attack blacks in South Africa for "trying to fix blame" how about Argentinians related to the desaparecidos? Why is state terror and genocide OK in Spain but not in other countries? How would Kimmelman feel if his grandfather's remains were buried in an unknown mass grave, if his family had been forced into exile, if his family had lost everything and starved, if his grandfather or father or mother had been jailed for decades, if he was forced to go around to archive after archive seeking answers, knowing there were none, because his grandfather, who knew the full story, took it to his grave. How would Kimmelman feel if his sister had severe osteroporosis or some other disease caused by being starved after the war because his family had supported the legitimate government against the coup?

The characterization of Franco and the dictatorship betrays an extreme revisionism which again shows Kimmelman's hand. If you read the below, you will see Franco depicted as really just an anti-Communist Catholic and of course the Valley of the Fallen was designed to further reconciliation. Yet Kimmelman himself admits that Franco threw the remains of unidentified Republicans murdered by his own state terror apparatus mingling them with those of his supporters. And Republican political prisoners built the pharaonic monument to his dictatorship. That is exemplary Catholic behavior. The behavior of the allegedly moderate and acceptable dictator that Kimmelman clearly believes Franco to have been. But that is typical of many in this country, dictators are OK as long as they can keep unruly people abroad at bay and as long as their repression allows for foreign and economic policies in consonance with US interests.

Finally, though I could go on at far more length, I am offended by the extreme condescension and again, moral equivalence drawn between both sides at the conclusion, when Kimmelman compares the current state of affairs to the situation with a bickering married couple. Neither side wants to say anything that will hurt the other. So trivial must genocide, dictatorship and injustice appear to Kimmelman.
_______________________________________________________
ABROAD
In Spain, a Monumental Silence

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: January 13, 2008
MADRID

LAST month Spain passed a law that doesn’t make much sense, on its face, but says quite a lot about Europe in the new century.

The Parliament, fulfilling a campaign promise from 2004 by Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, ordered that families wanting to unearth bodies of relatives killed during the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s or who suffered as a political consequence of General Francisco Franco’s four-decade-long regime should get full cooperation from the state, and at the same time that every province in the country must remove remaining monuments to Franco.

Unearth the past — and erase it. Never mind that over the years most of these monuments have already been carted off, making the law largely toothless and symbolic. Even so, in the debates over it, nobody here has talked much about the inherent contradiction.

Or is it a contradiction? “A new generation has begun to look at the past,” Santos Juliá, a senior historian of the post-Franco years, explained to me one recent morning. “They’re the grandchildren of the civil war. My generation wanted to discuss what happened without a sense of culpability. The grandchildren look on the same years of reconciliation as an unending concession, and it is time to fix blame.”

Survivors build monuments to remember the dead, and tear down the statues of the tyrants who killed them, but mostly in vain. Statues and memorials inscribe history, which each generation rewrites to suit itself. In Budapest statues of Communist idols have been relocated to a park on the city outskirts to become virtual headstones at a kind of kitsch graveyard. Russia, in its dash to prosperity, remains conspicuously reluctant to rehash the past, but it also removed many signs of Soviet rule.

And of course nobody has scrutinized public symbols and spaces more than the Germans, for whom nearly every stone and street sign has provoked a fresh monument. The meeting room for the German foreign minister in Berlin is an example of the extent to which the Germans have gone even in private. Originally the office for the head of the Nazi state bank, then taken over by Erich Honecker, the East German leader, who met in it with his Politburo, the room was left nearly intact after the Wall fell when the Foreign Ministry moved in, so that on where paintings of Marx and Engels once hung behind Honecker’s chair, faded rectangles were left as cautionary reminders.

Spain is different, though, having endured a civil war. With their traditional fear of deep, dark demons in their soul, Spaniards after Franco’s death and during the transition to democracy entered into what has long been called here a pact of silence, which the new law clearly aims to undo. As the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper put it 40 years ago, about a different regime, “A single personal despot can prolong obsolete ideas beyond their natural term, but the change of generations must ultimately carry them away.” You might say that in Spain’s case the change now comes a generation late.

I recently drove the 45 minutes to revisit Santa Cruz del Valle de los Caídos, the Valley of the Fallen, Franco’s most megalomaniacal monument. The highway passed by bulls, those reared for bullfights, grazing in green fields, then abruptly rose into snow and gloom. During the 1950s thousands of prison laborers tunneled hundreds of yards into a solid granite mountain ridge to build one of the world’s biggest and most lugubrious basilicas and a Civil War memorial, beneath a cross nearly 50 stories high.

The site expressed Franco’s desire for national atonement. His rule, as Raymond Carr, a Franco historian, once wrote, was not really a victory of the Falange, the Spanish version of fascism, “but of Catholic, conservative Spain over the liberal Spain of the Second Republic.” And Franco, on his crusade to save Christian civilization, modeling himself after monarchs like Philip II, intended to echo the monastic austerity of Philip’s nearby Escorial.

The architecture brings Albert Speer more to mind. The remains of murdered Republicans were unearthed from mass graves and trucked to the valley to be mixed with dead Nationalists, so it could be designated a place for all civil war victims. Even today most Spaniards aren’t aware that Republicans are buried there along with Franco and the founder of the Falange Party, Franco’s onetime rival, José Antonio Primo de Rivera.

The site culminates at the high altar with the graves of those two men, a fresh bouquet of flowers laid on each tombstone. Four hundred thousand people a year are still said to visit the place, although it was nearly deserted the other afternoon. A young Spanish family meandered glumly through the cold and silence, gazing up at the glowering statues of soldiers and saints. On the slushy plaza outside, the view toward Madrid and the giant cross disappeared behind black clouds.

“The idea that Spaniards have actually been unable to talk about the past is rubbish,” Charles Powell, a historian, said, citing many books, movies and television programs about the civil war. But public declarations are one thing, he elaborated. In many villages where neighbors betrayed one another, and even husbands and wives don’t easily talk about the war, a common policy is still don’t ask, don’t tell.

Long before the law was passed, nearly all Franco monuments were removed under socialist and conservative governments. But it was done quietly, without a public airing of the issues, as if the democracy were too fragile to bear the conversation, some say, although probably because Spaniards who had lived through the last Franco years had simply come to the conclusion that it was best and so wished to move on. This, however, still left a gap.

Even today you must comb through an English translation of a glossy guidebook to the Valle de los Caídos to find a passing remark about the prison laborers. In Madrid an avenue is still named Caudillo, after Franco, and another is named after the division of soldiers Franco sent to aid the Nazis. In Santander, although soon to be replaced by a parking garage on orders of the conservative local government, there’s a statue of Franco on horseback that can bring to mind the statues of Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson in American Southern towns where mayors and police chiefs are now often black.

Beatriz Rodríguez-Salmones, 63, who handles cultural affairs for the conservative Popular Party in Parliament, is exasperated by the new law. Digging up graves is any family’s right, she said, although she pointed out that the relatives of the poet Federico García Lorca do not want to disturb the grave where his corpse was dumped along with the bodies of bullfighters and banderilleros because it would demean the nature of his death. What happens now, she asked, when the banderilleros’ descendants want to dig the grave?

“But monuments have nothing to do with graves,” she went on. “Probably 90 percent of the Franco monuments are already gone. We’ve had amnesties. We’ve recognized the rights of exiles. We compensated professors who lost their jobs. We changed streets names, the flag, always trying not to hurt one another.” She said Mr. Zapatero is making an issue of monuments to appease parliamentary allies: “Separatists, Republicans, radicals.” He needs their votes, she added, “and the votes from the Catalan and Basque regions — from those who look for confrontation.”

She has a point. Now watered down from when it was called a law of “historical memory,” as if such a thing could have ever been legislated, the law excludes objects of religious and artistic significance (the determination of art being left notably unclear). Not even at the Valle de los Caídos will anything likely happen except that political rallies have been banned, a provision intended to thwart the annual tributes on Nov. 20, the anniversary, as it happens, of both Franco and Primo de Rivera’s deaths. But nobody seems to know whether this can be enforced.

Over dinner Santiago Saavedra, a publisher who came of age during Franco’s later decades, winced when the subject of the new law surfaced. He saw it as an attack on his generation. “We are made to feel guilty for having led our lives,” he said.

Mr. Powell, the historian, nodded when I relayed that remark. “National reconciliation really took place during the 1960s and ’70s, when Franco was still in power, through a natural process, not by government edict, but because of a collective feeling that the war had been horrible and that Spain had to move on,” he said. The civil war was hardly debated in Parliament, he pointed out, until the election of a conservative prime minister from the Popular Party, José María Aznar, in 1996, which ended years of Socialist rule. “That came as a shock to the left,” Mr. Powell said. “Aznar had ties to Franco’s past. His grandfather was an ambassador to Cuba under Franco. So an easy way for the Socialists to question the Popular Party’s authority was to demand that the party disown Franco.”

Across Europe, as the political center has widened, both left and right have scrambled to differentiate themselves from each other. Little actually separates Prime Minister Zapatero’s economic policies from those of Mr. Aznar. But whereas Mr. Aznar’s grandfather was Franco’s ambassador, Mr. Zapatero’s grandfather was a Republican killed in the war.

Mr. Zapatero’s conservative critics say he is using identity politics, akin to the moral values debate in America, to promote a social agenda that includes defending the rights of homosexuals, transsexuals, women and Catalans. The new monuments law adds another group to that list: dead Republicans, the civil war’s losers. But to the liberals of Mr. Zapatero’s generation it still doesn’t go nearly far enough.

“What Spaniards did in the 1960s and ’70s was look in a different direction,” said Paloma Aguilar, one of these grandchildren of the war, a 42-year-old political scientist who has written a book on historical memory. I mentioned the publisher, and she backtracked slightly. “O.K., yes, it’s a bit unfair to criticize our parents’ generation. It’s also true that most people even today don’t complain about the monuments because they’re used to living with them. Our parents’ generation still has some fear of confrontation because they think democracy is still fragile. But I grew up under democracy. Seventy years after the civil war we cannot allow these monuments that perpetuate discrimination against the victims.”

I sensed she felt that many Spaniards who had forged the transition to democracy and the peace it entailed didn’t know what was best for them, reminding me of a remark by Mr. Powell. He described a “new nostalgia” for Republicanism. It implied a moral superiority not just to Franco but also to the current political system. Then again, Ms. Aguilar and others of her generation clearly realize that this is the last moment to fight over monuments and graves before victims’ relatives die (many of their own relatives) and the dictatorship and its legacy pass from living memory. Impatience is expedient.

I made a last stop at the apartment of Blas Piñar. A couple of years back, on the prime minister’s orders, a statue of Franco was spirited away in the middle of the night from a plaza in Madrid. Mr. Piñar and others protested. At 89, founder of the ultra-rightist Fuerza Nueva, which even Franco found too reactionary, he greeted me eager to launch headlong into a kind of stump speech for the old dictatorship, pausing, from time to time, to gasp through a tracheotomy tube.

His complaint about the transition, unlike that of the new generation of leftists, was that it was a political wolf in sheep’s clothing. “A trick,” he called it, “billed as reform but in fact a rupture, which changed the most fundamental elements of society: protection of the family, moral and religious values, the unity of Spain.”

Now even the monuments are being removed, “the final blow,” as he put it: “The law of historical memory is anti-historical because it tries to erase the memory of Franco, and all the good that he did for Spain.” Prohibiting Francoists from gathering at the Valle de los Caídos will not change anything, he warned. “The place has always had a particular significance. You can never separate Franco from it.”

I hated to agree with anything he said. But legislating monuments doesn’t rectify injustices of the past, it just fumbles with the symbols of history, reminding us why we devise them in the first place. Ultimately monuments gain meaning when we imbue them with it, otherwise they join the statues of cruel monarchs and bloody generals that have become the civilized backdrop to our parks and plazas.

You might say Spain’s situation after Franco’s death was not unlike a marriage: each side holding in reserve those remarks that would do the other side most harm. Silence created a bond. It’s golden, as the saying goes; statues and plaques are just metal and stone. That said, the new law, forged by the children of this silence, paradoxically injects these rusting symbols with fresh significance for a new century.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/arts/design/13kimm.html?ex=1357966800&en=59359ccfad1815c4&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

What does the war have to do with facebook?

UPDATE 1/28: My friend returned from Baghdad in one piece, after being subjected to rocket and mortar fire pretty much every day for two weeks. As he put it "there is no love in the Duck and Cover bunker." Black humor aside, at least it consoled me to know that he was checking facebook and that he claims that the messages I sent every day -- silly or affectionate or (attempting to be) funny -- helped him to stay grounded somehow.

A couple of years ago I happened to go by Union Square and saw a group of people placing military boots on the ground, it turned out to be an anti-war protest organized by various groups, among them the Quakers, that consisted of a pair of boots for each US soldier dead in Irak. Each pair had a label with information about a soldier and they were arranged more or less by state. I spontaneously volunteered and spent probably an hour carrying boots and placing them with several others, quiet repetitive work. I would read each one, wondering over their lives. Then I spent a couple of hours on another day at the Judson Church welcoming people and giving out information at an installation they had organized with facts about the war such as comparative costs of the war per day versus costs of improving health care or education, or the estimated civilian casualties. It felt somewhat good to do something...that was really nothing.

At the Venice BIennial this Summer, I was equally disturbed by the dissonance of standing in front of Emily Prince's work during the elite preview opening of the exhibition. In general, so much of the work shown had to do with political upheaval, migration and exile, the economic fallout from global capitalism, war, atrocities, but we were all privileged enough to fly into Venice and then go to fancy parties, the billionaire collectors swept in on yachts, young curators zipped around in their individual water taxis.... Prince's work, which consisted of drawn portraits of US soldiers dead in Irak, was based on photos and arranged according to the soldier's home state. A wall-sized US map looked strangely pixelated until you got up close, and to your horror you saw individual faces staring back at you, their names lovingly inscribed by hand by the artist. For me that was the best piece in the whole Biennial because it made all of this injustice personal and immediate and it forced you to actually look. Prince created an archive which was shown beside the piece, consisting of individual index cards tracking each soldier, and an album with the copies of the ID photos pasted on each page.

For a while my morning route took me past the Judson where they update the casualty numbers (civilian and soldier) every few days, I would stop and look.

Since my scholarly work deals with war, and my own family has been marked by civil war and political dictatorship, I should be more focused on Irak. In fact, I am pretty much oblivious. When I travel outside of NY, for example to Florida, I am struck by the large numbers of yellow or American-flag-themed ribbons stuck to cars. Although in NY there are thousands of US Flags posted in public and private places, the majority were placed after 9/11. I remember returning to Mid-town to work. This was after a fruitless day waiting in a cue to give blood at St. Vincent's on 9/12, and feeling like I was in some kind of Leni Riefenstahl-directed nightmare scenario. There were flags EVERYWHERE, people were wearing ties, scarves, you name it, festooned with the stars and stripes. My whole neighborhood was plastered with flyers asking if anyone had seen people last known to be in the buildings. Those reminded me of images from Argentina of the desaparecidos. I woke up to the smell of fire and saw smoke at the end of Sixth Avenue. This is the closest I have been to a "war."

I remember going to a friend's party that took place right after 9/11 and feeling guilty that I was dancing. I also remember being scared to go on a plane but having to do so anyway a couple of months after it happened, because one of my best friends was getting married, and I was a bridesmaid. (The dress thanks to her elegance was gorgeous and I have even worn in to black-tie events since though now I am about 3 sizes smaller than then. The hair was less successful, the Southern queen who styled it exclaimed "Y'all look like Imelda Marcos!" after he finished an updo that I had requested resemble Holly Golightly's. He couldn't cope with the profusion of Ethic Hair) At the wedding we also all felt shell-shocked and a bit guilty to be dressed up and dancing. Yet now while in the middle of a war, this doesn't seem to cross my mind, or that of people I know.

Every so often I am nauseated at the thought that we are killing people while over here we're eating delicious meals, shopping at Banana Republic, going out dancing, living as if nothing is happening. I am ashamed at the thought that, when Anderson Cooper announces the latest horrific bombing, I either change the channel or barely register the information. And I am ashamed however to say that I am in extremely upset each time the ETA terrorists carry out an attack and murder people in Spain. That is very vivid because I lived there and know what it's like to hear about a bombing and have to call friends and loved ones to make sure they are OK or to think: "Oh, I go by that place often, but not today. I could have been dead."

Now one of my dearest friends is in Baghdad. This is a person that I have known since I was 18, a friend who has never ever disappointed me and who has been there for me at the absolute worst times in my life. Ironically, the very Big Brotherish features that I worry over on facebook I now am grateful for, such as the "status update" and the "date stamp" that indicates when one performs an action, or the "feed" letting me know about a friend's virtual "activity." This is because when he called from the airport last week to say good-bye, he assured me that he would post each day to let everyone know he is OK. So if I check facebook and I see something, I know he is OK for that day, more like on that moment.

He will be there for a short time, I tell myself. I feel completely incapable of doing anything with this new found realization and I feel ashamed that it has taken me this long to empathize to this degree. I cannot imagine how people who have loved ones there for indefinite periods of time can cope. I have new found admiration for them. I hope that they understand that many of us think the war is unjust but that it's not a condemnation of the soldiers or their families. This is of course incredibly obvious and embarrassingly banal. Like most rhetoric related to the war it means next to nothing. So I continue to go shopping for groceries, going to the gym, watching TV, "interacting" on facebook, writing this blog, while people are getting killed.


Latest US Soldier casualty count; 3,904 (Jan. 11, 2008, source: http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/index.html)

Estimated number of civilians dead: over 88,000 (source: http://www.iraqbodycount.org/)

Information on Emily Prince: http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/06/04_biennale.shtml

Mr. Blackwell's Top 10 Worst-Dressed List

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/popup?id=4105517&contentIndex=1&page=1

I don't know how I managed to miss this which came out two days ago - but Mr. Blackwell issued his annual Top 10 Worst-Dressed List. This is something that, much like Miss Universe, I look forward to every year. I must be in some kind of a funk, the stupid primaries distracted me as well, and one of my dearest friends is in Baghdad, so I am worried. Still, a glamour girl like myself should never drop the ball on fashion. Enjoy the photo gallery compiled by ABC news which includes pithy quotes from Blackwell who must be a nonagenarian by now!!

Here is the list:

MR. BLACKWELL'S 48TH ANNUAL WORST-DRESSED WOMEN LIST

10.) Alison Arngrim: "Little Nellie of the prairie, looks like a 1940's fashion editor for the Farmers Almanac."

9.) Lindsay Lohan: "Lindsay the fashion frenzy strikes again! Lohan takes fashion to a new low."

8.) Jessica Simpson: "Forget the Cowboys. In prom queen screams, can it get any worse? She's a global fashion curse!"

7.) Avril Lavigne: "Gothic make-up courtesy the mad spatula-Fashions provided by.. The house of Dracula!"

6.) Eva Green: "Stuck in neon nightmares not fit for the sane. Fashion this loud could give Bond a migraine! A profusion of confusion from toes to nose!"

5.) Kelly Clarkson: "Her heavenly voice soars above the rest... but those belly-baring bombs are hellish at best! She may be the queen of 'Pro-Active' – but that wardrobe looks downright radioactive!"

4.) Fergie: "Another style-free 'Fergie' in fashion's hall of shame? Yes, when it comes to couture chaos, guess it's all in a name!"

3.) Mary Kate Olsen: "YIKES! In layers of cut-rate kitsch, Mary Kate's look is hard to explain... she resembles a tattered toothpick-trapped in a hurricane!"

2.) Amy Winehouse: "Exploding beehives above…tacky polka-dots below... she's part 50's car-hop horror."

1.) Victoria Beckham: "Forget the fashion spice - wearing a skirt would suffice! In one skinny-mini monstrosity after another, pouty posh can really wreck-em."

Mr. Blackwell is a gentleman, he opted to omit perennial list topper Britney Spears because she is going through a difficult time in her life. I am glad, I think this is because I wouldn't want him to look at photos of me in the mid-eighties and mid-nineties.

The Return of the Dreaded Spandex Legging

Liza Minelli once said that the hardest part of being sober is waking up every day. I couldn't agree more, but the NH Caucuses joined to a post in the NY Magazine Shopping section heralding indeed gloating over the return of the dreaded spandex legging - worn as a pant - is about to push me over the edge. Whatever takes me to unconscious numbness the quickest that's what I am talking about. What is worse, Anderson Cooper addressing RALPH REED as some sort of pundit, or the New York magazine fashionistas endorsing what I will call possibly the greatest fashion atrocity of the Twentieth (and now Twentyfirst) Century?

I had already noticed portents of sartorial doom, the harbingers of tackiness unleashed gullible innocent undergraduates, eagerly sashaying around town and bringing on BEFPTS (Bad Eighties Fashion Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome). Note the photo, which assumes the woman wearing this (yes, the woman who courts danger and a very real possibility of an embarrasing ailment in her future...but let's not go there) is assumed to be anorexic and her thighs are separated by a chasm wider than the ideological divide between Bush and the Axis of Evil.

In reality the way the leggings are most likely to flatter a woman's figure is more like this:



Yes, that is ICE T and his lovely wife Coco. I should at least give her a shout out for confidently rocking the offending garment, fully at ease with what can only be called a Chacon-sized coolan.

The ICE T photo is from one of my fave blogs gofugyourself.

Below, the offending article:

http://nymag.com/shopping/features/42567/?om_u=Bqihpy&om_i=_BHg7a2BrFneP4n&aid=388690249&mid=1796634511&time=1199814326&issue=_BHg7a2BrFneP4n

El Hogar de Alaska

In my favorite Almodovar movie, Pepi, Lucy, Bom y las otras chicas del monton, Spain's new wave sensation, Alaska appears aged 16 as a punk rock teen who seduces a downtrodden housewife from Murcia, the video is of her singing a love song called "Murciana" - the lyrics are priceless. She is still performing, now with Fangoria, and is remarkable for supporting gay rights and for dressing in a fabulous 1980s way even today. In the most camp article ever to appear in HOLA and there is a lot to choose from, Alaka and her husband Mario (who is also her manager and looks a bit like Marilyn Manson with less make up) were featured in the home decoration section of the magazine. Every issue opens with a spread revealing the posh estate of some petty aristocrat, international celeb, fashion designer, former supermodel, millionaire and the like. People like Donald Trump, Isabel Preysler, Oscar de la Renta, Tita Thyssen, lady Di's brother, the owner of the Freixenet champagne company, etc.

Usually the homes are either Swiss style ski chalets, French Louis something style palaces, preppy chintz-laden type, something conventionally officially "tasteful" and expensive and usually very very tacky. Sometimes you get over the top campy like the home of Dolce & Gabanna. But most of the time, it's aristocratic-aspirational style. So it was truly fabulous to open my HOLA and see the Madrid home of Alaska and Mario. Somebody at HOLA must have a sense of humor and got the couple's campy parodic take on the pretentious and hackneyed section. The home's silver kitchen which looks like a morgue was described by Alaska in the accompanying interview, she said it was inspired by Warhol's Factory.





We also saw his and her bathrooms: hers in a neo-Keane big-eyed painting and Barbie theme all in red, and her husband's, wallpapered with photos of Elvis.





But the best of all was the paradigmatic living room shot. Alaska totally worked the traditional HOLA lady pose. But she is reading, and the coffee table is full of, vintage Spanish porno magazines from the period after Franco died, when porno proliferated with the end of censorship. The best part is that one of them has the fabulous Bibiana Fernandez on the cover - Bibi formerly known as Bibi Andersen, has appeared in several of Almodovar's films and is Spain's most famous transgendered person. Alaska's TV set features a video of the famous series "El Coraje de Vivir" which was like a telenovela featuring a cancer-riddled Lola Flores telling her own life story, complete with VERY dramatic re-enactments. She had been accused of tax evasion, so the story is that she made the series for Spanish government TV to pay it off.

At the far left you can see Lola Flores' face on the TV screen.

Here are clips from Coraje de Vivir:




from there on You Tube you can see more (you will want to, there is NOTHING better than Lola Flores)

Morena Clara

Aside from the fact that the late Lola Flores was the greatest singer and dancer in Spanish history, I would love her just for her role in the deeply camp, ironic and subtext-heavy Morena Clara. So many of the movies made under Franco found ways to undermine and work against the draconian censorship, but to me the ways in which this movie deals with gender, class and race politics is astounding. Lola plays an insouciant gypsy girl who is taken from her slovenly and lazy gypsy relations and adopted by a dandyish andalusian aristocrat in order to "re-educate" her in his lovely Orientalist style country estate. The opening sequence gives a surreal survey of Spanish history with the two leads - Lola and Fernando Fernan Gomez - cast in various historical guises: for example, Lola as a Moorish temptress and he as a victorious Christian conqueror.

You get the picture. The subjugated others are translated into a fiery female. It's so obvious that it's priceless. The whole concept of "reeducation" is also ironic because this is during a time when the regime was literally trying to reeducate those unfortunate enough to have been Republicans still living in the country. The title is also telling a dark light woman- she is not quite Gypsy/not quite Spanish (ie. White) a native informant who moves between the big house and the slave quarters, mediating between her marginalized family members and friends who are usually shown lounging in the fields or breaking into flamenco song and dance - the Spanish version of minstrels. Black skin/white masks - she is supposed to be lucky because she can "pass" and the white aristocrat welcomes her into his home in order to redeem her.

In this scene, Lola performs the title song, and in none-too-subtle foreshadowing, we see how the white aristocratic and rational male is overwhelmed by her sultry passion. It's hilarious.

Fever Part Two

Just to prove my point about the ubiquitousness of Dengue fever in Puerto Rico, here is a PSA from Island TV that I found on Youtube. (see below for my post on the racist article in the NYTimes about the alarming increase in Dengue fever and other "exotic" mosquito borne ailments in Itatly)

UPDATE 1/11/07

This morning I saw on the CNN crawl statistics on the marked rise in cases of dengue in PR which the crawl described as a "US territory."

This is the article from AP:

World News
Puerto Rico's dengue fever outbreak last year worst in nearly a decade

© AP
2008-01-10 23:30:00 -

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) - Puerto Rico saw 11,000 cases of dengue last year, the fever's worst outbreak in the U.S. Caribbean territory in nearly a decade, a health official said Thursday.
Dengue, which is spread by mosquitoes, killed four adults and four children in Puerto Rico during 2007, state epidemiologist Enid Garcia said
in releasing the final tally for the year. The oldest victim was 80 and the youngest 5 months old.
«It wasn't the worst we've had, but it was a serious epidemic,» Garcia said in an interview with The Associated Press.
The 10,964 cases recorded for the year were the most in Puerto Rico since a 1998 outbreak that caused 17,000 cases and 19 deaths, Garcia said. A 1994 outbreak totaled 24,000 cases.
In one of the worst years for dengue in recent decades, Latin America and the Caribbean counted nearly 800,000 reported cases and nearly 250 deaths in 2007, according to the Pan American Health Organization. Final figures were not yet available.

There is no vaccine for the tropical virus, which generally causes fever, headaches and extreme joint and muscle pain, among other symptoms.
Once thought to have been nearly eliminated from Latin America, dengue has gained strength in the region since the early 1980s in part because tourism and migration are circulating four different strains, increasing the risk of multiple exposure and making it more likely an infection will develop into the severe hemorrhagic form of the virus.