Categoría: cultura

¿Qué sucede si un musulmán y un judío van caminando juntos por la calle?

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La mayoría de las veces, los medios se esfuerzan por presentarnos imágenes de violencia y odio irreconciliable ya sea entre creencias religiosas, étnias, ideologías políticas o clases socioeconómicas diferentes. Considero que esa imagen negativa se puede acabar, que el reconocimiento de nosotros mismos primero y el conocimiento del otro a quien tememos es la clave para comprender mejor el planeta que compartimos. La empatía, la amistad, y la buena fe juntos pueden lograr que nos conozcamos mejor entre nosotros y derrotar ese sentimiento de alteridad que muchas veces nos aterra y nos hace prejuiciosos. Para mi este es un gran mensaje de paz. Me encantó el efecto de este experimento social. Tengo amigos musulmanes y déjenmes decirles que son las personas mas cálidas, inteligentes y honestas que he conocido. Pierdan el miedo, conozcan, viajen, júntense, sean amigos, pierdan el temor a lo diferente. Abrazos para todos.

Attorney General: Charles Joseph Bonaparte

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“To have a popular government we must, first of all, and before all else, have good citizens.”
—Charles Joseph Bonaparte

chas.bonaparte

Charles Joseph Bonaparte – Forty-Sixth Attorney General 1906-1909

Charles Joseph Bonaparte was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on June 9, 1851. He graduated from Harvard College in 1871 and from Harvard Law School in 1874. He was admitted to the Maryland bar. Bonaparte was appointed a member of the Board of Indian Commissioners in 1902. For a number of years he was a member of the Board of Overseers of Harvard College, and was one of the organizers and president of the National Municipal League. For several years he was chairman of the Council of the National Civil Service Reform League. Bonaparte was a presidential elector for Maryland on the Republican ticket in 1904, the only Republican elected. On July 1, 1905, he was appointed Secretary of the Navy. President Roosevelt appointed him Attorney General of the United States on December 17, 1906, which office he held until March 4, 1909. He died at his estate, Bella Vista, near Baltimore, on June 28, 1921.

Updated November 4, 2014

In: justice.gov

Bonaparte was born in Baltimore, Maryland on June 9, 1851, the son of Jerome (“Bo”) Napoleon Bonaparte, (1805–1870) and Susan May Williams (1812–1881), from whom the American line of the Bonaparte family descended, and a grandson of Jérôme Bonaparte, the youngest brother of French Emperor Napoleon I and King of Westphalia, 1807–1813. However, the American Bonapartes were not considered part of the dynasty and never used any titles.

In: wikipedia

See more at: Annual Report of the Maryland State Bar Association, vol. 26

Charles Joseph Bonaparte, who served as U.S. attorney general under president theodore roosevelt, was one of the organizers of the Civic Reform League and the National Municipal League, and he helped to found a Special Agents Force within the justice department that was the forerunner of the federal bureau of investigation (FBI).

A grandson of Jerome Bonaparte, who was Napoleon’s youngest brother, Charles Joseph Bonaparte was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 9, 1851. After graduating from Harvard College in 1871, he attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 1874. Bonaparte returned to Baltimore and established a private practice. At the time, public corruption of elected officials was widespread in the United States and the political situation in Maryland was considered to be the worst in the country. Bonaparte, of Italian-American descent, became interested in civic reform, commenting in an article published in Forum magazine that the politicians of that period if not technically criminals themselves, were the “allies and patrons of habitual lawbreakers.”

Read more at: encyclopedia.com

Shirley Ellis – You Better Be Good, World

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SHIRLEY ELLIS: she was funky yet classy, sophisticated but sassy. Unjustly pigeonholed as a novelty act by many rock historians, Shirley was a unique talent who could rock the joint with the best of ‘em, then spin on a dime and hold a packed house of hip nightclubbers in the palm of her hand, spellbound by her cool mastery of a jazzy ballad.

A clever songsmith of Caribbean ancestry, Shirley (if her reported birth date of 1941 is accurate) was only 13 when the Chords (of “Sh-Boom” fame) committed her composition “Pretty Wild” to wax. As a singer, the Bronx-based teen won Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem while also performing as a member of the Metronomes and getting spliced to group leader Alphonso Elliston.

Hubby managed the Heartbreakers whose 45 “One, Two, I Love You” was a further example of Shirley’s creative prowess. It was through a songwriting cousin of Alphonso’s that Shirley forged a partnership with Lincoln Chase. Spectacularly unsuccessful as a record star, Chase was one of the biggest writers of the 1950s, supplying stars like Chuck Willis, Big Maybelle and Ruth Brown with top of the range songs and scoring hits for the Drifters and LaVern Baker with “Such A Night” and “Jim Dandy”, respectively.

In 1959, Chase became not only Shirley’s songwriting partner but also her manager and, later, her producer. The symbiosis was immediate; he saw in her the raw stuff that stars are made of, while she sensed his innate ability to mould her into one. The pair worked ceaselessly together over the following years on perfecting every aspect of her talent. A tentative release for the small Shell logo in 1961 marked the recording bow of Shirley Elliston – nobody cared. False start.

It was not until the fall of 1963 that the years of preparation paid off with the diminutive thrush’s Congress label debut, the incredibly exciting “The Nitty Gritty”. Taking over where Trini Lopez had left off a few months earlier with the loose, live, feel-good smash “If I Had A Hammer”, Chase fashioned the hippest slice of au-go-go, street-smart madness of 1963 or any year since. Demo copies of this George Harrison favourite read “The Real Nitty Gritty” by Shirley Elliston but the title and the singer’s surname were edited for commercial release. Shirley Ellis, after years of grooming, became an overnight Top 10 hitmaking sensation. Although she didn’t quite explain the meaning of “The Nitty Gritty”, the listener instinctively sussed that it was the unadorned kernel of reality at the heart of anything and everything. The phrase grabbed the imagination of society’s mainstream and is enshrined in the common vocabulary to this day.

“(That’s) What The Nitty Gritty Is” was no more enlightening and, let’s face it, a tad opportunistic. This soundalike follow-up stalled in the lower reaches of the chart and, after the no-show of the vastly superior “Takin’ Care Of Business” and a “Nitty Gritty”-style revival of Chase’s “Such A Night”, it seemed that the Ellis bandwagon had ground to a halt. Forget it pal! As Christmas 1964 lurched ever nearer, Shirley bounced back onto the charts with a bullet. The convoluted craziness of “The Name Game” was impossible to withstand and would become the singer’s biggest hit. She proved a sensation on Murray the K’s Brooklyn Fox Holiday Show that winter, taking “Name Game” requests from the crowd. Let’s hope that Shirley-Shirley-Bo-Birley had the sense to ignore Buck!

The fun kept coming as her wildly percussive follow-up began an equally impressive chart run while breaking Shirley Ellis internationally. Her third Top 10 smash finally brought the star recognition in Britain and many other territories but “The Clapping Song” would prove impossible to top. A lowly placing for the rubber-band rhythm of “The Puzzle Song” was to be the lady’s last chart showing for Congress.

Shirley’s “I Never Will Forget” stiffed as did her ominous Christmas 1965 single “You Better Be Good, World” on which reindeer quaked under threat of atomic devastation. The overly-dopey, yet curiously cherishable, “Ever See A Diver Kiss His Wife While The Bubbles Bounce About Above The Water?” erm . . . bubbled under the Hot 100 for five seconds in early 1966.

Shirley was then signed by Columbia. She registered her chart swan song with the memorable “Soul Time”, the second of a trio of 45s for her new outlet. A June 1967 Columbia album, her third in all, was the last we heard from Shirley. Although she was reported to have then pacted with the Bell label, no records were forthcoming and she vanished into retirement.

Three fondly remembered smashes is more than many more feted artists achieve and, although Shirley Ellis is one of that dignified handful who resisted the oldies circuit, her oft-revived classics continue to delight listeners the world over. All together now . . . Three-six-nine, the goose drank wine, the monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line; the line broke, the monkey got choked and they all went to heaven in a little row-boat!

In: http://www.spectropop.com/ShirleyEllis/

this artist tattoos and beheads china figurines to take on art history’s gender bias

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Jessica Harrison’s reworked ceramic heroines prove women are not ornaments.

British artist Jessica Harrison tackles and unpacks assumptions about the female body with her cleverly embellished figurines. The found ceramics are selected for their silly poses, onto which Harrison adds her own flourishes: an anatomical overhaul spiked with tongue-in-cheek humor. As Harrison puts it, “the re-worked ceramic makes the figure a participant in their own undoing.”

Deploying a wide variety of materials in her artistic practice, from paint to textiles to digital collage, she regularly explores the intricacies of the sensory body. She’s made silk scarves with muscle patterns and roughly articulated clay pin-ups. Examples of Harrison’s work are currently on view in the group show Ceramix, at La Maison Rouge in Paris, which explores experimental ceramics by a range of artists from throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. We caught up with the artist to discuss feminism, creativity, and undercutting art history’s gender bias.

Your pieces in the Ceramix exhibition are shown under the sub-heading “Sacred and Profane: Revisited Traditions.” How does that title relate to your work?
I guess my work in the exhibition slots in quite well with that summary, given that I’m appropriating or re-thinking ornamental items that were acquired with the intention of showing off a particular taste within the home. Simplistically, you could say that traditional pieces are trying to appeal to some kind of “good taste” middle-class Englishness. They kind of have this weird pointlessness to them — their poses, their expressions — the figures are just in some kind of bizarre moment of blissful, bland nothingness. With the Broken figures, I am trying to activate their poses, give them some meaning; and in Painted Ladies, the crudeness of the tattoo designs highlights the ridiculous outfits these poor ladies are forever subjected to.

What prompted the Broken series of decapitated, scalped, and otherwise “injured” ladies?
I had an interest in working with the figure, but I didn’t want to make something figurative — I was trying to move away from overly defined outlines of the body. The series was a playful, cathartic way to try to re-work the figure. With these pieces, I reference that kind of anatomical enlightenment era, when the body was being explored from the skin down to the bone, and everything in-between. However advanced our explorations of the body have become since, this interior anatomical space is still gender-biased — a classically and continually male space. The female body is only typically used when illustrating a specifically “female part” of the body: the reproductive organs. The female interior space is still laced with taboo in a way that the male interior is not. I know this is still the case because I’ve received criticism for reworking female figurines — that it is somehow more “violent” than reworking male figurines.

You don’t consider the pieces violent?
I don’t. Each figurine has been carefully chosen based on their existing pose, where the re-worked ceramic makes the figure a participant in their own undoing. I like to think that these passive ladies have been given a more active role, more in line with how the male body is depicted, in both anatomical history and art history. I do consider them to be quite humorous though, and this is usually the reaction that they get, from children right up to older audiences (who more typically might have owned these kind of figurines originally).

Do you see these two series as feminist? What role does feminism play in your work?
I am a feminist and feminist issues are important in my life, work, ideas, and how I go about my everyday business. Having said that, I don’t consider “feminism” to play an active or overt role in my work, but the continuing issues facing women and young girls today is of course something that is always going to be threaded into my work when dealing with figurative pieces or the subject of the body.

Can you talk about your use of “found ceramics”? How does that influence your practice?
I started working with found ceramics because I didn’t know how to make ceramics from scratch — I decided to work backwards and get to know clay back to front. The Broken and Painted Ladies series, made using mass-produced figurines, could in theory continue forever. A part of me would like to keep going, to re-work all of the figurines that exist in the world, but there are too many other projects out there for me to be working on.

‘Ceramix’ is on view at La Maison Rouge and Cité de la Céramique in Paris through June 5, 2016.
jessicaharrison.co.uk

CreditsText Sarah Moroz
Images courtesy Jessica Harrison
In: i-d.vice.com

Here’s how American journalists covered the rise of Hitler in the 1920s and 30s

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How to report on a fascist?

How to cover the rise of a political leader who’s left a paper trail of anti-constitutionalism, racism and the encouragement of violence? Does the press take the position that its subject acts outside the norms of society? Or does it take the position that someone who wins a fair election is by definition “normal,” because his leadership reflects the will of the people?

These are the questions that confronted the U.S. press after the ascendance of fascist leaders in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.

A leader for life

Benito Mussolini secured Italy’s premiership by marching on Rome with 30,000 blackshirts in 1922. By 1925 he had declared himself leader for life. While this hardly reflected American values, Mussolini was a darling of the American press, appearing in at least 150 articles from 1925-1932, most neutral, bemused or positive in tone.

The Saturday Evening Post even serialized Il Duce’s autobiography in 1928. Acknowledging that the new “Fascisti movement” was a bit “rough in its methods,” papers ranging from the New York Tribune to the Cleveland Plain Dealer to the Chicago Tribune credited it with saving Italy from the far left and revitalizing its economy. From their perspective, the post-WWI surge of anti-capitalism in Europe was a vastly worse threat than Fascism.

Ironically, while the media acknowledged that Fascism was a new “experiment,” papers like The New York Times commonly credited it with returning turbulent Italy to what it called “normalcy.”

Yet some journalists like Hemingway and journals like the New Yorker rejected the normalization of anti-democratic Mussolini. John Gunther of Harper’s, meanwhile, wrote a razor-sharp account of Mussolini’s masterful manipulation of a U.S. press that couldn’t resist him.

The ‘German Mussolini’

Adolf HitlerAdolf Hitler. AP Photo

Mussolini’s success in Italy normalized Hitler’s success in the eyes of the American press who, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, routinely called him “the German Mussolini.” Given Mussolini’s positive press reception in that period, it was a good place from which to start. Hitler also had the advantage that his Nazi party enjoyed stunning leaps at the polls from the mid ‘20’s to early ‘30’s, going from a fringe party to winning a dominant share of parliamentary seats in free elections in 1932.

But the main way that the press defanged Hitler was by portraying him as something of a joke. He was a “nonsensical” screecher of “wild words” whose appearance, according to Newsweek, “suggests Charlie Chaplin.” His “countenance is a caricature.” He was as “voluble” as he was “insecure,” stated Cosmopolitan.

When Hitler’s party won influence in Parliament, and even after he was made chancellor of Germany in 1933 – about a year and a half before seizing dictatorial power – many American press outlets judged that he would either be outplayed by more traditional politicians or that he would have to become more moderate. Sure, he had a following, but his followers were “impressionable voters” duped by “radical doctrines and quack remedies,” claimed the Washington Post. Now that Hitler actually had to operate within a government the “sober” politicians would “submerge” this movement, according to The New York Times and Christian Science Monitor. A “keen sense of dramatic instinct” was not enough. When it came to time to govern, his lack of “gravity” and “profundity of thought” would be exposed.

In fact, The New York Times wrote after Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship that success would only “let him expose to the German public his own futility.” Journalists wondered whether Hitler now regretted leaving the rally for the cabinet meeting, where he would have to assume some responsibility.

Adolf Hitler at the German Opera houseAdolf Hitler at the German Opera house. AP Photo

Yes, the American press tended to condemn Hitler’s well-documented anti-Semitism in the early 1930s. But there were plenty of exceptions. Some papers downplayed reports of violence against Germany’s Jewish citizens as propaganda like that which proliferated during the foregoing World War. Many, even those who categorically condemned the violence, repeatedly declared it to be at an end, showing a tendency to look for a return to normalcy.

Journalists were aware that they could only criticize the German regime so much and maintain their access. When a CBS broadcaster’s son was beaten up by brownshirts for not saluting the Führer, he didn’t report it. When the Chicago Daily News’ Edgar Mowrer wrote that Germany was becoming “an insane asylum” in 1933, the Germans pressured the State Department to rein in American reporters. Allen Dulles, who eventually became director of the CIA, told Mowrer he was “taking the German situation too seriously.” Mowrer’s publisher then transferred him out of Germany in fear of his life.

By the later 1930s, most U.S. journalists realized their mistake in underestimating Hitler or failing to imagine just how bad things could get. (Though there remained infamous exceptions, like Douglas Chandler, who wrote a loving paean to “Changing Berlin” for National Geographic in 1937.) Dorothy Thompson, who judged Hitler a man of “startling insignificance” in 1928, realized her mistake by mid-decade when she, like Mowrer, began raising the alarm.

“No people ever recognize their dictator in advance,” she reflected in 1935. “He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will.” Applying the lesson to the U.S., she wrote, “When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”

John Broich, Associate Professor, Case Western Reserve University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

In: businessinsider

 

I ‘Went Back to China’ — and Felt More American Than Ever

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Six years in Hong Kong showed me how deep racism runs in Asia’s world city.

BY CRYSTAL CHEN / OCTOBER 21, 2016

On Oct. 9, New York Times metro reporter Michael Luo revealed that he and his family had been subject to a racist outburst on the streets of New York City’s posh Upper East Side. Readers, especially of Asian descent, were quick to volunteer their own stories in the aftermath, showing that while racism against Asians is not always in the U.S. public eye, it is widespread. I’d like to address this article to the woman who told the U.S.-born Luo — and to all those who may have harbored similar sentiments at one point or another — to “go back to China.”

My parents left China in the wake of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution to seek refuge in American higher education in the 1970s, eventually becoming entrepreneurs. I was born in Ohio, raised in Nebraska and California, and attended Yale University in Connecticut. Six years before that woman on the streets of New York told Luo to go back to China, I had already done so. After graduating college, I moved to Hong Kong, a port city that has been the West’s gateway to China since the mid-1800s.

I believed the city, a place brutalized and molded by colonial forces before its return to China in 1997, was somehow like me: an East-meets-West pastiche. I also believed that Hong Kong, more multicultural, global, and outward-looking than any mainland city, was likely to be the most racially enlightened. But after more than six years of living and working there, I would learn just how racially progressive the United States was by comparison. It’s not just because anyone can speak up and defend themselves, but because doing so is embedded in our culture.

Growing up in Nebraska, I was “ching-chong’d” in school and asked why my eyes were so small. Later on, popular kids would compel me to do their homework with overtures of friendship, only to ignore me at recess. Even in relatively liberal California, I was bullied and shut out by the girls in my all-white Girl Scout troop. My early life in white, Christian America impressed upon me the notion that my real home, my real friends, was where my parents had left it — back in China.

In college, I devoted myself to the notion. I holed myself up exclusively in Asian cultural clubs and worked to beef up my half-hearted, lisping Mandarin Chinese. I took classes in Chinese philosophy, sociology, and politics. Internships in Beijing and Shanghai and travels around the mainland gave me a glimpse of what my new home would be like. After graduation, I secured a job in Hong Kong.

My mother, who had moved from Shanghai to Hong Kong to the United States, was distraught: “Why do you want to go back there?”

But much, I insisted, had changed. The mainland wasn’t the Mao-era hot mess she’d left behind; the 2008 Beijing Olympics painted a glorious image of a new Middle Kingdom, and Lehman Brothers’ collapse that same summer foretold an ominous future for the United States. Out in the dizzying economic rise of the Wild Wild East, opportunities abounded for those willing to work in a globalizing China, particularly in Hong Kong, which billed itself as “Asia’s world city” and was also deepening ties with the mainland.

What I didn’t tell my mother was that my desire to leave was primarily motivated by the possibility of escaping the unfriendly U.S. racial climate. In Asia, I wouldn’t have to deal with being “Asian.” I wouldn’t be a minority, much less a model one. For once, I was certain, my race wouldn’t matter.

I moved to Hong Kong in 2010 to work for a multinational education company and cast myself with a privileged lot of expatriates, or huayi — ethnic Chinese who have grown up abroad. It was deeply comforting to be surrounded by people who looked like me. And because I spoke perfect English and had attended an Ivy League university, my social currency in status-conscious Hong Kong went further than most. I was not just able to “blend in” — I was privileged. I was heard, respected, and invited to glittering parties. Those first years in Hong Kong were beautiful and easy.

But eventually my conscience began to gnaw at me. At work, invisible walls divided colleagues by skin color. White managers who had worked all their lives in Asia sometimes looked surprised when I spoke up in perfect English to volunteer my opinion — a small thing, but revealing. A few seats away from my desk sat Filipino colleagues, often ignored or greeted with terse, awkward smiles when they tried to make conversation. I saw a Pakistani colleague of mine held at arm’s length during team happy hours, lonesome with his glass of wine while his colleagues buzzed around him. A Sri Lankan friend of mine working in investment banking cried when she was passed over for a raise once again.

The city’s thorny relationship with race was even more obvious outside of work. I remember dining with an Indian companion and being thoroughly ignored by the waitstaff, even beyond the standards of usually brusque Hong Kong service. Locals regularly complained to me about being paid less than their expat counterparts. And on the streets, images of hapa women, men, and babies — half white, half Asian — were featured prominently on billboard ads, the city’s aspiration to whiteness hiding in plain sight.

Hong Kong is also home to hundreds of thousands of Filipino and Indonesian domestic workers — 320,000, as of 2013. On Sundays, their day off, Hong Kong’s otherwise mostly hidden domestic helpers swarm public parks, much to the chagrin of locals who I’d hear complain of what they saw as their parks being “overrun.” Workers who have served Hong Kong families loyally for decades cannot become permanent residents, dependent instead on a work visa that could be stripped from them at any moment. The 2016 Global Slavery Index — compiled by the Australia-based nonprofit Walk Free Foundation, which tracks government action on forced labor, human trafficking, and other conditions of modern slavery — ranked Hong Kong’s government in the bottom 5 percent worldwide. Reports surface regularly about domestic workers being beaten or sexually abused by their employers. These people served me cocktails, cooked the food I ate, bussed my plates without a sound, painted my nails, massaged me, and cleaned my apartment. “That’s just capitalism,” my erudite friends would say, but I couldn’t shake the truth that my privilege floated on cheap Southeast Asian labor and the diminished social position they occupied.

With each year that passed, I became increasingly aware of the morally fragile foundations of the lifestyle I enjoyed. I had believed that spiriting myself to Hong Kong would mean that I wouldn’t have to face racial discrimination anymore. Bewitched by the possibility of transcending the racial totem pole, I only later realized that I had merely relocated to the top, and the view wasn’t what I expected. Being brought up in the United States meant my standards for racial equality were forged in a culture built around the dissent, dialogue, and disruption that the First Amendment vouchsafes.

It was only after six years in Hong Kong that I began to understand why people leave their countries to come to the United States and why it’s so difficult to repatriate. You can’t unlearn what you’ve learned or unsee what you’ve seen. Neither could I unlearn the promises of equality that I’d repeated every time I took the Pledge of Allegiance.

I had been running away for a long time. I had run away from being a “victim” of American racism to become part of the perpetrating class in Hong Kong. I had hid from the yellow face in the mirror and pretended, with my perfect English and my elite education, that I was someone else. I had tried to “go back to China,” only to find myself more American than I’d realized. But I’m not running away anymore. I’ve found that my “home” isn’t limited to a physical place. It’s not in Hong Kong, China, or the United States. It’s in the people I love and the work that needs doing. It’s in the values I hold that grow and change over time.

So, to all those who have ever wanted people like me to “go back” to China: My home is on a bridge as short as a hyphen and as wide as the Pacific Ocean. My home is an in-between place, as it is for all Americans who remember their roots, their history, and the journey that got them here. My home is a compromise, a discussion, a negotiation.

In: foreignpolicy 

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