August 2010
45 posts
I Have a Nightmare: Glenn Beck as Phony Messiah →
The budding “prophet” who once described President Obama as a man “who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture” declared “something that is beyond man is happening” as he opened his Glenn Beck religious revival at the Lincoln Memorial this weekend.
Saturday was all about the weird theme that America’s honor needs restoring,...
“There is nothing more odious than the majority; it consists of a few powerful...”
– Goethe’s Maxim
“Depopulation should be the highest priority of foreign policy towards the third...”
– Henry Kissinger, a former secretary of State and a national security adviser to the US president
Understanding Malcolm X and Martin Luther King
Malcolm
When we turn to Malcolm X, we hear a different voice from that of Martin Luther King, one that whites and some blacks found most disturbing to their religious and political sensibilities. Malcolm X was a Muslim minister and Black Nationalist leader, who was the most formidable race critic in American history. More effectively than anyone else, he exposed the racist hypocrisy of...
“Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of...”
– MLK
Moroccan Cinema →
Although video piracy and the closure of cinemas are a problem, Morocco’s film industry has finally taken a flight, with the aspiration of becoming a major point of reference on the map of world cinema.
Notable recent films:
Two Women on the Road by Farida Bourquia
Where are you going Moshe? by Hassan Benjelloun
Goodbye Mothers by Mohamed Ismail
Satan’s Angels by Ahmed...
Borge and I →
The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography, the...
Love Apart →
The moon has ascended between us, Between two pines That bow to each other;
Love with the moon has ascended, Has fed on our solitary stems;
And we are now shadows That cling to each other, But kiss the air only.
—Christopher Okigbo
Addis Ababa’s growing art scene →
It has been an important week for Addis’s cultural life as the city has come to declare its emerging artistic identity.The third edition of Art of Ethiopia exhibition took place from the 21st to the 24th of August at Sheraton’s Addis Lalibela Grand Ballroom. One of the largest exhibitions ever held, Art of Ethiopia showcased more than 400 new works created specifically for the occasion. Around 40...
“Artistic devices of spatial illusion were developed in Europe during the...”
– Lois Zamora, Trompe l’oeil Tricks: Borges’ Baroque Illusionism
Ashley Bryan →
Award-winning author and illustrator Ashley Bryan,whose work is often culled from African and international folktales, is this year’s winner of the Regina Medal for his contribution to children’s literature.
Bryan, 87, grew up one of six children in Harlem and his passion for children’s books started early, when he began illustrating ABC and counting books while in...
Kach, Kahane Chai →
Kach and Kahane Chai are two marginal, extremist Israeli groups that have used terrorism to pursue their goals of expanding Jewish rule across the West Bank and expelling the Palestinians; they condone violence as a viable method for establishing a religiously homogenous state. Both groups grew out of the anti-Arab teachings of Rabbi Meir Kahane, a U.S.-born extremist who founded and led Kach (its...
Madame de Sévigné →
This robust and fertile writer … created her being, not in plays or poems, but in letters—touch by touch, with repetitions, amassing daily trifles, writing down what came into her head as if she were talking. Thus the fourteen volumes of her letters enclose a vast open space, like one of her own great woods; the rides are crisscrossed with the intricate shadows of branches, figures...
British novelists in their own words →
“It is important to know as much as possible about teenage smoking patterns and...”
– The Cigarette Makers
Switching Viewpoints: Africa Is Not a Victim of... →
Allan Afuah, an associate professor at University of Michigan, argues:
Poverty in Africa will be eradicated only if the world takes radically different approaches. A good start for doing so would be to see Africa for what it really is. It is not a victim of nature that has to beg for handouts to survive but a victor of nature that can thrive by learning how to create value and wealth using its...
Azmari of Arada →
Rich vivid colors and spontaneity … of Getahun Assefa Balcha, noted Ethiopian artist who demonstrates consummate versatility and accomplishment in a variety of mediums including painting, sculpture and mosaics. Now for the first time, foreign collectors will have the opportunity to experience and appreciate Getahun’s art in a series of paintings he calls “Azmari of Arada.”
...
Khat in Ethiopia: Taking the Place of Food →
Publisher’s Editorial Review:
Khat (catha edulis) is a psychoactive shrub whose tender leaves and twigs are chewed in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula for their euphonizing effects for a millennium. A stimulant grown in small gardens for consumption on cultural and religious occasions around the turn of the last century, khat has now become the preferred and most sought-after...
“¡Dime qué dices, mar, qué dices, dime!
Pero no me lo digas; tus cantares
son,...”
– Miguel de Unamuno
Argentina in love with books →
Books are venerated in a land where culture is everything.
To call El Ateneo Grand Splendid a bookstore is to call St. Peter’s Basilica a church; it does not begin to describe its breathtaking, celestial beauty.
This emporium of books began life in 1919 as a theatre, with a deep stage, a brocaded curtain and a painted dome (with its allegory of peace) designed by an Italian artist,...
“He said: “If we say the central question is who we are, we are Africans....”
– Andile Mngxitama
Throw Yourself Like Seed →
Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit; Sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate That brushes your heel as it turns going by, The man who wants to live is the man in whom life is abundant. Now you are only giving food to that final pain Which is slowly winding you in the nets of death, But to live is to work, and the only thing which lasts Is the work; start there, turn to the work....
“Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some...”
– Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man
Brilliantly Animated Thoughts →
The Secret Powers of Time (Philip Zimbardo)
The Crises of Capitalism (David Harvey)
The Emphatic Civilization (Jeremy Rifkin)
First as Tragedy, then as Farce (Slavoj Zizek)
Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us (Dan Pink)
Left Brain, Right Brain (Matthew Taylor)
Smile or Die (Barbara Ehrenreich)
The Economic (Stein Ringen)
Hegel & Haiti →
By the eighteenth century, slavery had become the root metaphor of Western political philosophy, connoting everything that was evil about power relations. Freedom, its conceptual antithesis, was considered by Enlightenment thinkers as the highest and universal political value. Yet this political metaphor began to take root at precisely the time that the economic practice of slavery—the...
“the entire space
of my soul
is burning
how long can i
hide the flames...”
– Rumi
The Need to be Acknowledged: Osho
Why is it that I feel I need to have approval and be recognized, especially in my work?
It has to be remembered that the need to have approval and be recognized is everybody’s question. Our whole life’s structure is such that we are taught that unless there is a recognition we are nobody, we are worthless. The work is not important, but the recognition. And this is putting things upside down....
Watch
The Cu Chi Tunnels, a documentary film, is the story of life underground told by the people who lived the experience. During the war in Vietnam, thousands of people in the Vietnamese province of Cu Chi lived in an elaborate system of underground tunnels.
Originally built in the time of the French, the tunnels were enlarged during the American presence. When the Americans began bombing the...
Kenya votes 'yes' in referendum peacefully →
The new constitution’s key reforms: “reduces president’s powers, devolves power to regions, creates commission to manage public land, creates senate, recognizes Kadhi (Muslim) courts, allows no position of prime minister, limits the number of cabinet ministers to 22, addresses abortion rights, allows voters to recall MPs if they do not perform their job adequately”. -...
Watch
President Obama to young Africans: “50 years from now, when you look back…”
Saving indigenous languages →
The first large wave of Han Chinese to Taiwan who inter-married with indigenous people, with the Chinese culture becoming dominant, and previous governments’ oppressive policies were responsible for years of harsh suppression of native Taiwanese languages and dialects. The Taiwan government has now begun to make efforts to save Taiwan’s indigenous languages, not only because indigenous...
WatchIn defense of cultural and religious tolerance …
"The hippiest philosopher" => SZ →
“Slávoj Zizek is an unusual philosopher with unfashionably inflexible left-wing views. He also loves Hollywood classics. He has written more than 30 books on subjects as diverse as Alfred Hitchcock, Lenin and 9/11. A self-proclaimed Leninist, the Slovenian thinker believes that “communism will triumph finally”. - Times of India (TI)
TI: You call yourself a Leninist but the media in the...
