Richard III

by Allen Ginsberg

Toenail-thickening age of me,
Sugar coating my nerves, leg

muscles lacking blood, weak kneed

Heart insufficient, a thick'd valve-wall,
Short of breath, six pounds

overweight with water-

logged liver, gut & lung - up at 4 a.m.

reading Shakespeare.

February 4, 1977, 4:03 A.M., NYC

The aging male finds his painful body on paper, another fragile form of materiality, while reading Shakespeare at 4 o'clock in the morning. This is what I mean by male hysteria.

Allen Ginsberg with Peter Orlovsky,
1963, a photo by Richard Avedon

do you hear what I'm saying?

Romanian writers in Romania: out

via aglomerarispontane

Alexandru Vakulovski is one of the most successful and daring contemporary writers from Romania. Even if he is writing and publishing mainly in Romanian, he studied, worked and lived there for more than 10 years, he is kicked out of the country for not being a citizen. He was waiting for his papers for last 4 years: the answer came, he had to leave the country and get back to Moldova in 2 weeks. Now he is already there and he is forbidden to enter Romania for the next 2 and a half years.

At the same time, some football player born in Germany with no connection to Romania except for the fact that his parents have Romanian origin receives his citizenship papers in 2 days. but the national football team needs him.

Sandu Vakulovski is my friend and I worked with him for two performances in Cluj. I know how hard it was for him to live in Romania as a Moldavian, being constantly harassed by authorities, being restricted to get out of the country because he was not sure that he can ever return. I feel guilty and ashamed that he had to go through all this and no one did anything to actually help him. I didn't do anyhting. Now we are all shocked and in a few days we will forget about it.

Sandu taking me a photo, he is already on the other side of the mirror

It really makes me angry and unproud of having a Romanian passport. Have to find a way to get rid of my citizenship: if I can't give it to Sandu, it doesn't worth shit for me now.

well, did we get there?

men's rights?

Today I looked for some articles on google news with the search word feminist. I am amazed how they lead you to all the Christian right newspapers. Is it possible that they actually encourage a certain line of thought with their too-human search engines? Anyway, at some point, I ended up with this article: First Father Falls For Feminist Fraud, Fails Fatherhood. Please pay attention to the usage of equality and gender aware discourse, how twisted it can get. I see this type of writing as pure mockery, making fun of struggles for rights for decades, of personal grief and pain. Violence is not a civil right, in any type of democracy that you can dream of. If fighting domestic violence and misogyny is gender based discrimination, then this type of discrimination is needed. I am particularly touched by this subject because I know the side effects of gender mainstreaming in Europe and what for what incredible backlash it was used. To the point of closing women’s libraries for not having a male perspective. And apparently these supporters of male rights are doing it for “making things more equal between the genders” and not for supporting patriarchy and their undeserved privileges:

As a fathers’ advocate, I had hope when President Obama was elected. Some expressed disappointment that the author of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) had become Vice President. They feared more gender-based discrimination.
Being a liberal egalitarian, I was optimistic. My president had said he respects our civil rights. I believed all we needed to do was show President Obama and Vice President Biden how false allegations of domestic violence hurt 170,000 children a year.1,2 How VAWA has lead to uncontrollable corruption from individual shelters all the way to the US Department of State.

I was sure President Obama would agree that every parent deserves due process. Those parents deserve a trial with a jury of their peers, before the possibility of losing custody of their children. I wanted to show him how many fathers are absent from their children’s lives, by no fault of their own.But before I knew it, President Obama disappointed me. He also disappointed millions of fathers who are grieving the unjust absence of their children. Instead of making things more equal between the genders, we now have an Office on Women and Children. And we don’t have one for men and their children.

Hard working honest Romanians

In Romanian culture there is a strong myth about hard working Romanian immigrants doing their duty. It is usually emphasized as a racist reaction to another cultural myth, Romanian Roma thieves & killers present all over Europe.

And these two images are all over media with no critical reaction to their racist connotations. I found this article in Daily Mail about a Romanian doctor. A pretty telling image for the "hard working Romanians" in Western countries:

A doctor who described her Asian colleagues as ‘orang-utans’ has been suspended by the General Medical Council.

Dr Silvia Baciu, 43, made the comments after claiming she had been subjected to insulting and threatening treatment because she was a white European.

But the NHS Trust she worked for accused her of racism and the GMC yesterday criticised her ‘unacceptable racial behaviour’.

Dr Baciu, who is originally from Romania, worked as a Senior House Officer in anaesthetics at Basildon Hospital, Essex, from June 2004 to November 2005.

After she left the department, she reuested a meeting with the Trust to discuss alleged

discrimination at the hands of her colleagues. She prepared a 12-page document to support her claims.

The GMC heard that she had written: ‘It’s not my fault that in the heads of senior Asian colleagues, there’s no difference between an educated white woman and a donkey. It’s not my fault that I was born in Europe and not

in South-East Asia, like other trainees. It’s not my fault that I’m white.

‘I dare to suggest to you, mon cher, that ( some doctors) are exempt from known immigration laws.

‘The brainy Asian males of this department can’t place themselves before the law.’

Dr Baciu, who lives in Northampton, added in the document that she feared that European science

would ‘disappear’ because there were so many Asian doctors.

She added: ‘The orang-utan section of the department is ready for action and I assure you of their effectiveness.’

Later in the document, Dr Baciu claimed she had been threatened and harassed and found attitudes towards her ‘very hard to endure’.

The GMC was told that Dr Baciu had problems adjusting to working in the UK. Craig Ferguson, for the GMC, also said there were concerns over her communication skills and her ability to complete written assessments.

Dr Baciu said that the word ‘orang-utan’ did not refer to the doctors’ appearance, but their aggressive and threatening behaviour, both in public and private.

But Mr Ferguson said: ‘Any reference to members of an ethnic group who differ from the dominant group in the UK because of the colour of their skin is racist, and any suggestion to the contrary is unsustainable.

'That this could be considered as anything other than racist is a nonsense.’

Suspending Dr Baciu for six months Ralph Bergman, who chaired the hearing, said: ‘The period of suspension will enable you to reflect on your unacceptable conduct, to take steps to become more aware of the unacceptability of racial behaviour and to satisfy a future panel that you have gained the necessary degree of insight.’

Mr Bergman added that Dr Baciu’s decision not to give evidence herself was concerning. The GMC recommended that she attend a training course in diversity before her case is reviewed later this year.

Cassavetes: Misogynist? Alcoholic! Messiah! Genius?

So, I watched Cassavetes’ A Woman under the Influence. I guess now the song by Le Tigre kinda resonates with my own disposition towards him, er, minus the son-of-god reference. I would summarize the plot something like 7th Heaven bad-tripping on LSD: the mental breakdown of a perfect housewife and mother, a savage rupture in the heteronormative script that goes to the heart of the perfect (white) American family romance. This early 70s drama chooses as its focus the dysfunction of a typical lower middle-class family, triggered by the woman’s inability to perform proper wifehood and motherhood. What remains when she is stripped bare of her wifely and motherly roles is the wild irrational, threatening, pathological femininity in need of urgent medical attention. Place the plot in the context of the 70s women’s lib movement, and the meaning becomes almost too obvious. But it’s worth watching, for all its racist and sexist self-gratulatory shoulder pats...

Cassavetes makes a point of having long uncut scenes that really drain the actors dry of their madness improvisation ideas, which leads to a lot of tension and little relief, and to a really engaged viewing – by which I mean, plenty of annoyance and frustration, in my case, a real ‘pfff’-trigger.

Maybe I am obsessed with reading social realities and anxieties into on-screen framings of individual alcohol-induced, pill-popping drama, but hey, we all have our hobbies, and that’s just the kind of thing I like to do on a Saturday evening.

Gender roles coming with gendered grammer in French

I found a grammer book for kids from the 1970s with some very telling images. How else can children learn gender in French than through patriarchal gender roles? And they will remember them both: patriarchy and French. Thank you school for facilitating a sexist welcome into the French symbolic order.

Examined Life (2008)

After "Zizek!", Astra Taylor brings another hit movie. Somhow similar, in the sense of placing abstract complex ideas into space, connecting them to a location, "Examined Life" puts 8 of the most influential contemporary thinkers in their place, or more psecific, in the place of their ideas.

"Peter Singer's thoughts on the ethics of consumption are amplified against the backdrop of Fifth Avenue's posh boutiques. Michael Hardt ponders the nature of revolution while surrounded by symbols of wealth and leisure. Judith Butler and a friend stroll through San Francisco's Mission District questioning our culture's fixation on individualism. And while driving through Manhattan, Cornel West compares philosophy to jazz and blues."

Sounds fun to watch. And anyway Butler and Zizek are great on camera.

Kicking ass history-textbook style

The fetish for one's national history can take many forms. One such bizarre twist of nationalism is the Moldavian national ‘fight’ called Voievod. Invented in 2002 by a former Taekwondo champion, this particular style ‘functions based on human biomechanics and on an efficient association of more fighting styles that lead to the perfection of the Moldavian technique’, according to the official website. Hm. And because despite their unquestionable authentic Moldavianness (documented by many, uh, obscure literary sources) the Voievod moves look more like Karate Kid practice, the fighters occasionally sport traditional Moldavian clothing items, such as the cusma (sheepskin hat) and the bunda (sheepskin jacket). Convinced now? I’m no sports expert, but to me this screams of attempting to reconstruct a very romanticized and macho fantasy of national history...

legit Banksy

Banksy has a new piece in Gillett Square in Dalston. The local council wants to clean the wall, people are protesting.

Authorities say:

"Our position is not to make a judgment call on whether graffiti is art or not, our task is to keep streets clean."

The speaker for a community organisation, Hackney Co-operative Developments, that defends the graffiti, says:

"I am shocked to hear of such an unpopular and unnecessary act of vandalism against a valuable work of art. Banksy is something of a folk hero."

Baudrillard says:

“one must surrender to the evidence: art no longer contest anything, if it ever did… The work of art offers itself of its own initiative as immediately integrable in a global system that conjugates it like any other object or group of objects.” (it was back in 1981)

I found this situation hilarious and dramatic also: Banksy's stencils always played this game of resuscitating images at the second level, the level of irony. Now graffiti is ironically treated as bourgeois propriety, as valuable and recognized work of art. That is done in the face of the local authorities' stupidity (but they are doing what they always did: destroy alternative expressions of any kind). It is interesting how the simple gesture of legitimating graffiti uses the ugly language of the establishment. How right Baudrillard was, decades ago.

via Evening Standard

Is Cosmo self-destructive? Not quite

in this Cosmopolitan article (that i couldn't finish reading), Michelle Stacey asks some weird questions for Cosmo:

Why are so many young women making their breasts public property? And who really ends up getting the best end of this deal — the girls who say all this flaunting makes them feel empowered and free or the men ogling them?

Maybe because they take all the goody goody Cosmo list of tips for real? but as this article on The Pursuit of Harpyness shows a valid feminist claim can fit a post-feminist discourse like Cosmo's by detouring it for a good old patriarchal usage.