Happy Kwanzaa + East Coast Blizzard

HAPPY KWANZAA! Habari gani.

Photo courtesy of the Official Kwanzaa website.

Kwanzaa, which has been around since I was a year old or so, is not a holiday I've regularly celebrated, though occasionally I have participated in friends' and community-based Kwanzaa observations in the past. More than anything I try to take its seven principles (the Nguzo Saba) to heart, and not just during the designated holiday week. The principles are ones I remember memorizing as a child: Umoja (unity), Kujichagulia (self-determination), Ujima (collective work and responsibility), Ujamaa (cooperative economics), Nia (purpose), Kuumba (creativity), and Imani (faith).
These were concepts I not only memorized, but steeped in growing up in the 1970s, an era when various strands of political and social "liberation," collective economic principles, and cultural nationalism and resistence were in the air.

While this new decade marks a distinctly different moment, I continue to believe that many of these principles remain aluable not only for African Americans and for black people across the globe, but also for people of all races throughout this and other societies, especially now that we face sustained economic, political and cultural assaults particularly from those who already have most of the power and money.  Even if you don't celebrate Kwanzaa, do consider how these principles might apply to you and how you can apply them in your life and to the communities you belong to.

For a bit of comedy (or outrage, depending) around Kwanzaa, there's always Food Network star Sandra Lee's (in)famous Kwanzaa cake (which food writer Denise Vivaldo apparently created out of the air), in all its awfulness (and yet I'm strangely drawn to it):


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I've been scoffing about the hoopla surrounding the current East Coast blizzard, since Chicago has already received multiple snowstorms, including a severe one that delayed my return a few weeks ago, but it really is coming down here in Jersey City. And it's cold, almost Chicago cold. Earlier today it was 24°F and now it's 21°F. It was a comparatively balmy 27°F in Chicago.

When I peeked out back, I saw easily over a foot of snow, and a view from the front door confirms the same.  According to the news, over 14 inches have fallen not too far south of here.  All of the local airports are closed, as are Amtrak from Maine to New York, and the Long Island Railroad also has been shut down.  The Philadelphia Eagles even canceled tonight's game against the Green Bay Packers, though I seem to remember teams playing in blizzards in past years, and even played in snow myself as a teenager, but perhaps the winds truly were too strong, and players, who make a lot more than they once did, have it in their contracts that they won't play in snow bowls if they can help it.

The trains that allow people to ride "in a hole in the ground," the MTA subway, are running, however, as are New York City's buses, but people all across the metro area have gotten stranded in snowdrifts. (I assume the PATH trains are still running, perhaps on the reduced schedule that the New Jersey Transit trains are.)  As I finish this entry, it's still snowing and the snowfall is forecast to continue until tomorrow morning, which means a day of digging out. Since early December, I've more than enough practice.


Snow in Jersey City, tonight

Snow in Jersey City, tonight

Snow in Jersey City, late this afternoon

Snow in Jersey City, late this afternoon

Snow in Chicago, December 6

Snow in Chicago, December 9

Snow in Chicago, December 9

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Happy Holidays & Merry Christmas

Happy Holidays - Merry Christmas - Happy Hanukkah - Happy Kwanzaa - Best Wishes For This Season and Always!

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Rugby League Four Nations Tournament 2010 + Casula Powerhouse Body Pacifica Calendar

It's the holidays, which means its time for what one J's Theater reader once charitably called "rugby porn." Not real pornography, of course, just shots of ruggers running, tackling, scoring...and whatever else it is they do on the field. This year's Gillette Rugby League Four Nations tournament occurred in Australia and New Zealand in October and November 2010, months in which I was working diligently and postly lightly. This year's participants were Australia, New Zealand, England, and the winners of the 2009 Pacific Cup, Papua New Guinea.

I'll skip all the tournament round-robin play, which amounted to 7 games, to say that the final pitted Australia against New Zealand, and the Kiwis won in a shocker to the dominant Aussie team, 16-12.  And now, that means photos!

Sam Thaiday of Australia

England's side

Frank-Paul Nuuausala of the Kiwis

Kiwi Shaun Kenny-Dowell being tackled by Michael Mark of Papua New Guinea

Paul Aiton of PNG being tackled by Kangaroos

Kangaroo Lote Tuqiri, vs. PNG

Paul Aiton of PNG facing England

PNG celebrating

Kiwis' Benji Marshall, against England

Papuans getting love from a fan

Aussies tackle an Englishman

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On a related but different note, a while back a friend in New Zealand alerted me and other sports fans about the Australian Casula Powerhouse's Body Pacifica 2010 calendar, which coincided with a June 25-August 2010 (winter in Australia) exhibit, as well as a 3-day weekend festival in June, celebrating "island culture." I can't speak to the exhibit itself or how well or poorly it was pulled off, whether it trafficked in exoticism and so forth, but my friend sent the link to the Body Pacifica calendar, which features Pacific Islander ruggers, including Frank Puletua, shown above, in what I thought was a surprising light, not posed in rugby gear, but as they themselves wanted to be depicted. A few shots of the calendar below (it's huge), and worth picking up!

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Darnton's The Library: 3 Jeremiads + Brathwaite's Elegguas + National Book Foundation's New Reading Prize

Last spring I checked out from the university's library the esteemed Enlightenment historian and (Harvard University) librarian Robert Darnton's The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009) to gauge his arguments about the present and future state of the world of books and literature for my own edification and to preview it for a class. Darnton, one of the most important figures in his fields, has a gift for subtle argumentation and narration, and I ended up skimming the book, which replicated in longer and more polished form a number of the essays he has been publishing along these same lines in the New York Review of Books, for the last several years. Many concern the role of the computer behemoth Google, and its relationship to the publishing and library worlds, and he has also made a passionate case in the pages of the NYR for a national (which would also be an international) digital library, drawing from the resources of private libraries like the one he heads, public ones like the unmatched Library of Congress, and the trove of 7 million and counting books that Google has already scanned in, with the cooperation of institutions like Harvard and the New York Public Library, but also against the wishes of some publishers and authors, who successfully prosecuted a lawsuit to gain compensation from Google for copyright infringement.

In the current issue of the NYR, in "The Library: Three Jeremiads," Darnton returns to the arguments he has made before, but this time with a trio of "jeremiads," as he calls them, concerning three pressing economic and resource-related issues that American research libraries face which also negatively affect scholarly publishing; universities and college library collections, along with those of public libraries; library patrons, which is to say, readers; and, to a degree not yet fully understood, the humanities, intellectual life, and knowledge production themselves. The first two of Darnton's jeremiad's focus on the exorbitant cost and terms, verging on extortion, of subscriptions to scholarly journals, especially in the sciences, relative to other kinds of texts, which has forced libraries to cut their purchase of scholarly monographs, thus harming libraries' budgets and university presses' bottom lines. Over the longer haul, this economic problem, juxtaposed with constrained university and research library budgets, threatens the sustainability of the academic research enterprise as a whole.  To give a sense of the astronomical prices charged by some publishers, information about which many professors are completely unaware and which have far exceeded the cost of inflation, the chemistry journal Tetrahedron costs $39,082 per year, while The Journal of Comparative Neurology costs $27,465 per year, and both, like many journals from a given publisher, must be purchased in bundles, with high kill fees to end subscriptions for specific journals and so forth. Humanities and social science journals total less per year but are still high and part of this system, with the result that the average cost in 2009 of a US journal title was $2,031 and $4,753 for a non-US title, and that year the journal publishing giant Elsevier made $1.1 billion in profits.  Moreover, there is little transparency in this system, according to Darnton, giving the journal publishers an advantage over libraries, which, for the sake of the scholars they serve, cannot opt out.

Scholars and librarians have attempted to respond, with mixed reuslts.  In the case of the Mellon Foundation-funded Gutenberg-e program, which sought to publish digital monographs of award-winning PhD dissertations in scholarly areas under greatest threat, the potential was great but it did not work out as planned, and the project is now defunct; in the case of digital, open-access scientific journals, there has been some success after scientists at University of California-Berkeley and Stanford circulated a petition in 2001 calling for colleagues to patronize only these journals. The publisher BioMed Central, according to Darnton, has shown since 1999 that this model can work. But the larger question of the effects on libraries and particularly on the humanities and social sciences remains. Darnton had been holding out hope for the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE), founded this year, would lead universities towards the open-access model in terms of publishing, and also subsidize authors who could not get grants or subvention money from their home institutions, with the texts ultimately available in both digital and print form via the Espresso Book Machine, about which I've written on here. But, and this is the core of his third jeremiad, there loometh Google.

A 368-page "settlement" between Google and the authors and publishers who sued the company (the publisher of my first book was party to this agreement, as Annotations, I gather, was scanned without permission) divided up the profits produced by Google Book Search in a 1/3 fashion: Google would 37 percent and the authors and publishers would get 2/3rds. Fine. But, as a result of this, Google has proposed that libraries, some of which (like Harvard's) provided books for scanning free of charge, now pay a subscription fee to access Google's vast digital storehouse, which is now the largest digital library (and as recent announcements have shown, potentially the largest digital book retailer). Darnton's fear, quite reasonable given the history of such things, is that "cocaine pricing" will occur, which is to say, Google will start out with low subscription fees and then jack them up to unspeakable--unaffordable rates--once it has libraries and everyone else in its clutches.

Of course most people are completely unaware of all of this, both in terms of what's going on now and what could occur in the future. As he has in the past, Darnton is proposing a counterweight to Google, which is a National Digital Library, which would draw primarily upon the extraordinary collection of books, particularly those no longer under copyright or still in copyright but out of print, whose authors cannot be located, and so forth, belonging to the Library of Congress, but also from other vast library systems, like Harvard's.  Darnton points out that in December 2009, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that he would set aside €750 million (roughly $900 million dollars, correct?) to digitize France's "cultural 'patrimony,'" and notes that the national libraries of the Netherlands, Japan, Australia, Norway, and Finland are digitizing their complete collections, and that European nations in collective fashion will have digitized over 10 million texts, from libraries, archives, museums, and audiovisual stocks, by the end of 2010.  Darnton believes that Google has shown that for less than the cost Sarkozy appropriated, it is possible to digitize the Library of Congress's complete holdings, a good deal of which are already converted, but that Google itself might be persuaded to share--for free, with a great deal of praise--the 2 million or so materials in the public domain it digitized.  Even if Google does not participate, Darnton believes private foundations might be able to underwrite this project, especially if its costs were spread out over time, but he does not believe that a Digital Library of America would solve or resolve the interrelated and waxing crises research libraries, the scholarly profession, and journal publication face. Rather, this vast digital storehouse, freely available to all, might change the "ecology" (back?) toward the idea of the public good, or public common, but even if it didn't do so completely, it would be an important start.

===

Speaking of books and reading, I just noticed the other day that Kamau Brathwaite has published a new book of poems, Elegguas (Wesleyan University Press/UPNE, 2010).  Wesleyan's site says of the book

Elegguas—a play on “elegy” and “Eleggua,” the Yoruba deity of the threshold, doorway, and crossroad—is a collection of poems for the departed. Modernist and post-modernist in inspiration, Elegguas draws together traditions of speaking with the dead, from Rilke’s Duino Elegies to the Jamaican kumina practice of bringing down spirits of the dead to briefly inhabit the bodies of the faithful, so that the ancestors may provide spiritual assistance and advice to those here on earth. The book is also profoundly political, including elegies for assassinated revolutionaries like in the masterful “Poem for Walter Rodney.”

Throughout his poetry, Brathwaite foregrounds “nation-language,” that difference in syntax, in rhythm, and timbre that is most closely allied to the African experience in the Caribbean, using the computer to explore the graphic rendition of nuances of language. Brathwaite experiments using his own Sycorax fonts, as well as deliberate misspellings (“calibanisms”) and deviations in punctuation. But this is never simple surface aesthetic, rather an expression of the turbulence (in history, in dream) depicted in the poems. This collection is a stunning follow-up to Brathwaite’s Born to Slow Horses (Wesleyan, 2005), winner of the Griffin International Poetry Prize.

Kamau is, as it also notes, one of the major poets of the 2nd half of the 20th century, and one of the leading lights in Caribbean, African Diasporic and Anglophone poetry, and I would add without hesitation one of the most important experimental and political poets alive today.  This fall has brought a marvelous harvest of new books by marvelous poets, and this appears as if it surely is among this bounty.

===

Speaking of more books and reading, the National Book Foundation is sponsoring an Innovations in Reading Prize.  For whom and what is this?

For individuals, institutions, and collaborative programs using innovative approaches to successfully inspire a lifelong love of reading POSTMARK DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 22, 2011 The complete application process is available in the Application Form. PDF Application form to be filled out by hand and faxed or mailed to the Foundation. Download > PDF Application form to be filled out on your computer using Adobe Acrobat and emailed to the Foundation. Download >

Each year, the National Book Foundation awards a number of prizes of up to $2,500 each to individuals and institutions--or partnerships between the two--that have developed innovative means of creating and sustaining a lifelong love of reading. In addition to promoting the best of American literature through the National Book Awards, the Foundation also seeks to expand the audience for literature in America. Through the Innovations in Reading Prizes, those individuals and institutions that use particularly innovative methods to generate excitement and a passionate engagement with books and literature will be rewarded for their creativity and leadership. Questions? Contact the Foundation at 212.685.0261. Sponsored by a generous grant from

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Carmen Herrera Paints On + Wojnarowicz Film to Travel

It sometimes is the case that great artists, especially highly original ones or who do not fit the artworld's templates and expectations, may work an entire lifetime and get little or no recognition or notice, and less remuneration.  Okay, that sounds a bit depressing, but here's a positive story, about Cuban-born, New York-based artist Carmen Herrera (1915-), discovered at age 89, that has been reported several times over the last year, though I like these two pieces, one in The Telegraph and the other in The Guardian UK, most of the ones I've read about this artist.  Both show Herrera to be a hoot, as sharp as a knifeblade and as candid as an open window, with a wit and way with words. (Her poor assistant.) But she also sounds like she could be fun to spend some time with, before you became a bother and prevented her from doing her work, which she is evidently (and thankfully) going to do, with aplomb, until she can't any more. So, take it away, Carmen Herrera! (from the The Telegraph interview, conducted by Helena de Bertodano, "Carmen Herrera: 'Is It a Dream?" reposted at Repeating Islands (by Lisa Paravisini):

‘It’s a very selfish way of doing things – I [Herrera] have to work on it for a while before I come to a decision. Sometimes it takes weeks and sometimes I get stuck.

I get very mad and sometimes I win and sometimes the picture wins. I hate being interrupted when I am working but now I am interrupted all the time.’ She looks at me accusingly and laughs.

‘Really, fame is ridiculous. I didn’t used to bother anyone and no one bothered me. Now I am paying because they are paying me.

‘The money is useful because at the end of life, to my amazement, you need a lot of help. Otherwise I would end up in a nursing home. And I dread that.’

Herrera has four helpers who rotate around the clock, enabling her to stay in the home she has occupied for decades.

I ask her when she moved in. ‘About 18 years ago,’ she says. Bechara, who sits in on part of the interview, intervenes. ‘Come on, darling, 18 years ago! You came here in 1968.’

‘You are very nasty, Tony,’ says Herrera. ‘When you are 95 you will forget your own name.’

If you happen to be in London, her work is currently on exhibit alongside work by Peter Joseph at Lisson Gallery, London NW1, until 29 January 2011.

Red with White Triangle (1961)

***

As has been widely reported, the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution bowed to crass political pressure when it removed the 4-minute excerpt of late artist David Wojnarowicz's (1954-1992) film "A Fire In My Belly" from its landmark queer portraiture exhibit, "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture." As the Chicago Tribune's Lauren Vieira reported on Saturday, it was only a month into the show's run when the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the outfit run by Bill Donohue, denounced the film as "hate speech," based on an 11-second clip in which ants crawl across a crucifix.  Shades of L'Age D'Or, etc. The lachrymose incoming Speaker of the House, John Boehner (R-OH), also slammed the work as a waste of taxpayers' money. Said the museum in a December 6th statement, the "Hide/Seek" exhibit would "continue as planned," until February 13, 2010, without Wojnarowicz's film, which allegedly "distracted from the overall exhibition." Ah, thuggery.

In response, some supporters of this particular artist and artwork, queer art and artistic freedom in general, and the rights of public museums not to be bullied have staged protests in Washington and New York City.  Vieira adds that a number of private museums and institutions across the country also have obtained permission from Wojnarowicz's estate to show the film; one will be the University of Chicago's Smart Museum of Art, which like several other Chicago-area museums plans to show it early next year, from January 4-February 6, 2011, accompanied by a faculty panel discussion. I am glad that other museums have decided to respond by highlighting the work of Wojnarowicz, who at his death had become one of the most important of the first wave of American artists and writers, and persons with AIDS, addressing the AIDS crisis and its devastating effects. Google to find out if "A Fire In My Belly" is screening near you, and if you're in Chicago in January, the Smart Museum's info is available here.


The 4'11" clip from "A Fire in My Belly" (from semiotexte, via YouTube)

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As for Haley Barbour's repellent comments today grossly revising the history the white supremacist Concerned Citizens' Councils, please see my blogpost of yesterday, and look carefully at the map of the slavocracy in 1860. Barbour is a Mississippian, and not of the progressive type. I need say no more.

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"Disunion" (Civil War History Series) in the New York Times

I'm going to sing the praises of The New York Times today, and note that since October 30, 2010, it has been publishing one of the best and most informative series of articles, mini-essays, and nonfiction stories (tales, in the older sense), under the title "Disunion," that I have read in any newspaper, journal or other periodical anywhere, ever. The pieces, along with a timeline, interactive maps and documents, and photos and engravings, commemorate the 150th anniversary of the breakup of the United States, in 1860, from period leading up to the election of Abraham Lincoln, to the chain of state secessions that provoked the four-year US Civil War (1861-1865). Each day one of several eminent and less well known historians, archivists and writers (Adam Goodheart, Ted Widmer, Susan Schulten, Jill Lepore, Jamie Malanowski, etc.) produces a short imaginative, usually narrative entry, based on their own or others' historical research, journalistic and archival documentation, and so forth, that fills in key gaps about how the North and South split, or rather, the cultural roots of the national divorce, in which North pressed its political, economic and sociocultural case to represent the nearly 100-year-old country's best interests, prevent its dissolution and end slavery, while the South hewed to the interests of its slave-owning leaders and began the process of secession to defend this odious institution. Some are more engaging than others, many incorporate the various trends underway in contemporary historiography (material, cultural and political history, the role of various discourses, the role of race and racism, feminist historiography to some degree, historical theorization and cultural theory, and quantitative methods), yet present vivid stories of our national unbecoming and becoming.

Others have focused on the particulars of candidate and then elected-but-not-yet-inaugurated new president Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican to hold office, shrewdly announced one approach publicly but manipulated his fellow party members behind the scenes; how Southern leaders, like Senators Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, James Henry Hammond of South Carolina, and Robert Toombs of Georgia, and plantocrats like Robert Barnwell Rhett, uttered rhetoric as harsh as any heard today espousing a desire to defend slavery at all costs, white supremacy as the social, cultural and political ideals of the Confederacy to come, and, in Toombs' case, the possible extermination of all black people if the Southerners did not get their way; how leading authors, like Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, discursively and creatively imagined this moment of national fracture; and how famous former US residents, like Giuseppe Garibaldi, a revolutionary in Brazil (Rio Grande do Sul) the founding hero of a united Italy, were linked directly what was occurring on these shores.

In today's paper, Harvard historian Lepore historicizes Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride" to show how it was as much about preparation for the coming war as about the Revolutionary era hero, and writer and memoirist Edward Ball shows that South Carolina, the first southern state to secede (and which will celebrate the 150th anniversary of its secession tomorrow), made clear in its articles of secession that the right to enslave fellow human beings as property was central to its traitorous fissure.

One of Goodheart's entry, one of the most moving and riveting I have read yet, described Harriet Tubman's final pre-war journey south, to rescue her sister and niece and nephew in Maryland. Yet when Tubman learned that her sister had died and then her family members did not turn up at the appointed meeting place, Tubman helped a couple escape, which entailed a drama fitting of the best narrative poem or short story one might imagine (an allegedly "crazed" white man was repeated walking about and mumbling to himself in a clearing near where Tubman and the fugitives had hidden, and after a while Tubman realized he was giving them secret instructions about how to get away!). Tubman, the couple and their infant, who had to be drugged to remain quiet, did make it across the Mason-Dixon line, they heading on to Canada and she back to her home in Auburn, New York, and this story, which I have read about in more than one book, came to life for me again in a way that felt as fresh and thrilling as any version I'd heard of it before.
Yet another entry, Schulten's exceptional interactive entry, "Visualizing Slavery," discussed the demographic particulars of the slavocracy on the eve of the war, in 1860, with a superb map I have pored over. One could compare this to current racial-ethnic demographics as well as voting patterns and draw obvious conclusions.  My native state, Missouri, interestingly enough, had the second largest total population of any of the slave states (after Virginia) of over 1.1 million people, the second largest free population (mostly white), and the second smallest population, by percentage, of enslaved people (only Delaware's was smaller). That free white population by 1860, I know from my own reading and research, consisted of many immigrants from German-speaking Europe (many having fled after the failed Revolution of 1848) and Ireland, as well as a good number of internal migrants from upper South states like Kentucky, Tennessee, and western Virginia (which would, during the Civil War, become its own state). Though the article did not discuss this, it fascinates me to consider how Missouri's demographics accounted in part for why the state split during the Civil War, with a pro-Union governor and both its Congresspeople still in Washington, and a Confederate government in exile, in Texas.  It was to this government, another "Disunion" article noted, that Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, appealed for resolve, as the likely depredations of the looming war became ever clearer.  Missouri remains split, now mainly between the two Blue-Democratic urban-suburban poles (Saint Louis and Kansas City, and their surrounding counties/suburban areas) and the rest of the state, which is often mostly a sea of red (GOP-conservative). The parties have flipped, but the ethos, 150 years later, would not be so strange to residents of that earlier era....

The US slaveholding states, as of 1860 (Texas to Delaware)

I highly recommend reading as many of these pieces as possible. One thread that emerges clearly is Lincoln's steely, far-sighted skill as a tactician even before the War, and the utter failure of his predecessors, particularly James Buchanan (at right), as inept a president as ever held the office. However horrible we may consider George W. Bush, or notable ringers like Warren Harding, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Pierce, etc., none apparently compares to the extremely qualified but extremely ineffectual, feckless Pennsylvanian, who watched South Carolina, and then a handful of other states, threaten and then leave the United States, and responded with blandishments, a non-binding agreement and then silence, which only emboldened the other states thereafter. His cabinet also disintegrated apace. Lincoln, "spewed out of the bowels of Kentucky into Illinois," as the South Carolinian fire-eater Rhett labeled him, was quite aware of what would transpire if the Senate passed the Crittenden Act, which would have papered over the growing political rifts, or similar legislation, and pushed the country towards division, such that the federal government, through its military, would have to confront and end the slave system. How he did this was masterful, but as entry after entry demonstrates, it was bound and had to occur. In the best of hands, thankfully, the nation's fate landed, after a long stretch of some of the worst tenure imaginable.

It would be a great boon to all if the New York Times would pick other periods and other skillful scholars and writers to focus on. Concerning the US, perhaps the Gilded Age, or the Great Depression, or the Vietnam War, or, going further back, the pre-Revolutionary period, or the War of 1812, would be moments to choose. Historical periods outside the US, such as the era of European encounters with Africa and the New World beginning in the 1500s, or earlier moments of political, economic and cultural exchange between China, Japan, and Korea, or the revolutionary period in 19th century Latin America, say, might also be enlightening. The success of this series, which I suppose is still to be measured, might also point to the Times regularly publishing fiction, poetry, and other imaginative work, as well as accessible scholarship too. The blogging format is a good one for short pieces, and as the "Disunion" series demonstrates, when done well, it can provide news, 150 years old yet, as anything else appearing in a newspaper's pages.

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Bye Bye, DADT! + Niemeyer's 103rd

There's been so little to celebrate of late with the current administration or the now lame-duck Congress, and the capitulation on the tax cuts for millionaires-to-get-an-extension-of-unemployment insurance for the most vulnerable Americans, during the winter holidays no less, was a particularly bitter pill.  But today proved that the government will not end the year only on low notes.

Today brought one of the highest of the year thus far. Although Senate Republicans last week killed a bill to provide funding for 9/11 first-responders and the Defense Appropriation Bill, which had included a DADT repeal component, and this morning, with the support of five Democrats, quashed passage of the Dream Act for the children of undocumented immigrants, the Democrats with some GOP help today broke this sorry string by first voting 63-33 (a third of the US Senate was still voting no, but six Republicans, Collins, Brown, Murkowski, Olympia Snowe, Mark Kirk and George Voinovich, voted with nearly all the Democrats) to invoke cloture on a bill introduced by Joe Lieberman, then voted 65-31 this afternoon to repeal the 1993 Don't Ask Don't Tell (DADT) policy, which barred openly lesbian and gay servicepeople from serving in the US military. The House had already passed a DADT repeal earlier this week. President Obama, who had promised in campaign to repeal this odious policy, has fulfilled this promise, and is expected to sign the bill in the next few days.

For years before the 1993 policy, enacted under President Bill Clinton as a response to extreme reactions to his attempts to end the prior, harsher policy against LGBT servicepeople (Secretary of State Colin Powell, the Chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was strongly against allowing openly gay LGBT to serve), brave active duty soldiers, veterans and gay activists had fought to allow LGBT people to serve openly in the military, and after the 1993 policy took effect, activists increased their efforts to repeal DADT, since like previous policies it consigned valuable members of the US military to dismissal, destroying their careers and livelihoods prematurely, based solely on their sexual orientations or others' perceptions thereof.

After this week's votes I, like all other LGBTQ people, and like all Americans, can say I have lived to see the day that this heinous, unequal policy and the one preceding it were repealed by my federal representatives, and signed into law by the President. Most impressive to me was that Congress's courage finally matched that of the American people, who in increasing numbers in recent years have come to believe this policy should be ended, and that of the military's leaders, officers and soldiers, who also agreed that it should be repealed.

Thank you to all those who fought tirelessly to end this policy, through protests, lawsuits, putting their careers and lives on the line. Thank you to all the LGBT people who protested, wrote their officials, wrote articles and blogs to push for the repeal, and to all the non-LGBT allies. Thank you to all those in the military leadership, from the Secretary of Defense to the Chairperson of the Joint Chiefs and present and past officers, who changed their views and did the right thing. Thank you to the rank-and-file, whose responses helped to shape the broader public discourse and the specific arguments used by those who still were unsure. Thank you to Congress, especially Speaker of the House Pelosi, and Senators and Majority Leader Harry Reid, Joe Lieberman, and Kristen Gillibrand, along with the handful of Republicans, for passing this bill. And, once President Obama signs it into law, we will be able to thank him for doing what he promised he would do, and what should have been done years ago.

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On Wednesday, one of the great living architects, Oscar Niemeyer, an artist whose medium is sinuous concrete and steel, turned 103, and celebrated his birthday by inaugurating the newly opened site he had designed in 1997, the headquarters of the Fundação Oscar Niemeyer (Oscar Niemeyer Foundation), in Niterói, a city across Guanabara Bay from Rio de Janeiro.  The Foundation was created in 1988, but is only now debuting this spectacular, futuristic site, which is several kilometers to the north of another of Niemeyer's masterpieces, the space ship-atop-a-hill that houses Rio's/Niterói's Museum of Contemporary Art. Both the foundation's new headquarters and the Museum are part of a series of buildings and sites, known as the Caminho Oscar Niemeyer, in Niterói (formerly the provincial capital when Rio de Janeiro was the federal capital of Brazil), which also includes People's Theater of Niterói, Charitas Boat Station, and Plaza JK (Juscelino Kubitschek, Brazil's president from 1956-1960, and the visionary behind Brasília).  All are accessible after a short and picturesque ferry-ride from the city of Rio.

Though Niemeyer has designed notable sites and buildings all over the world, 600 in total, including some of the buildings at the United Nations (with Le Corbusier), he is perhaps most famous for his site plan and structures for Brazil's third and permanent capital, at Brasília, which he created at the behest of then-president Juscelino Kubitschek beginning in 1956.



Debuting in April 1960, Brasília unfolds on a vast plane in the hinterlands along a monumental axial plan devised in 1958 by Niemeyer. All of its iconic buildings are his designs, dating from the late 1950s forward: the Palácio da Alvorada, the Presidential residence; the Metropolitan Cathedral of Brasília; the National Congress Building; the Federal Supreme Court; the Palácio de Planalto Presidential offices; the Square of the Three Powers; the Itamaraty Palace, for foreign relations; and the Brasília airport.

For these and his many other works, Niemeyer was awarded the 1988 Pritzker Prize for Architecture. He continues to design buildings and sites; one of the newest is the Prince of Asturias's Cultural Center, in Avilés, Spain, which also debuted on Wednesday.  Parabéns e feliz aniversário, Oscar Niemeyer e que foram muitos anos mais!

Niemeyer, with his wife (to his right) fans, at the event.

 Niemeyer and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Niterói

Fundação Niemeyer site from a distance (photo by Fábio Barros)

 Prince of Asturias Cultural Center, in Avilés, Spain

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Quotes: Nicholas Carr + Richard Holbrooke

"The constant distractedness that the Net encourages--the state of being, to borrow another phrase from Eliot's Four Quartets, "distracted from distraction by distraction"--is very different from the kind of temporary, purposeful diversion  of our mind that refreshes  our thinking when we're weighing a decision. The Net's cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively. Our brains turn into simple signal-processing units, quickly shepherding information into consciousness and then back out again.
     "In a 2005 interview, Michael Mezernich [Emeritus professor of neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco] ruminated on the Internet's power to cause not just modest alterations but fundamental changes in our mental makeup. Nothing that 'our brain is modified on a substantial scale, physically and functionally, each time we learn a new skill or develop a new ability,' he described the Net as the latest in a series of 'modern cultural specializations' that 'contemporary humans can spend millions of "practice" events at [and that] the average human a thousand years ago had absolutely no exposure to.' He concluded that our brains are massively remodeled by this exposure.'"--Nicholas Carr, from The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010, pp. 119-120. (H/t and thanks to Lisa Moore)

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Could the late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke (1941-2010) have put things more simply and candidly as his last words as he was being wheeled into surgery? Is there anything concerning the ongoing foreign policy disasters, warmaking, failed nation-building, and budget busting to fill the coffers of the military-industrial complex that this current president (and any future ones) need pay more attention to? Here's a suggestion: why don't each of us print out this statement, properly quoted and attributed, on a postcard (to save money) or a piece of paper, and send it to our Congresspeople? (We might even consider sending one at least once a week for the month of January, as a wakeup call to them. Perhaps I'll organize this on the other blog, and let's see how this goes...)

""You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan." - Richard Holbrooke

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