2007 - %3, February

Pole Dancing, Margaret Cho, the Whitney: Julie Atlas Muz's Got It All

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| Mon Feb. 5, 2007 6:13 PM PST

In an age when anyone living in a metropolitan area can sign up for pole dancing classes at a local gym or be coached in the art of burlesque, it might seem unlikely that sex work-inspired performance art could gain the artistic prestige of Marcel DuChamp and Man Ray. But a review in today's New York Times compares the work of Julie Atlas Muz to both these heavyweights of modern art. The performance artist and burlesque star who has performed at the Whitney Biennial and the Miss Exotic World Pageant (and is touring with this year's Sex Workers' Art Show that Mother Jones reviewed here) celebrated the opening of her first solo show, "Divine Comedy of an Exquisite Corpse" this Saturday. "Exquisite Corpse," as the Times reports, is a commentary on "suicide, terrorism, and fear," laden with undercurrents about feminine power and aging. This sounds like the present wave of feminism at its most diva-like. You have social commentary about sex and politics all wrapped up in glitter with a lot of skin showing. But Muz says it's just "good old Vaudeville." It sounds like a lot more than old Vaudeville to me. While Vaudeville and Muz' work may be about stylized performance and glamour, the latter is about reclaiming and elevating both low art and feminine sexuality.

--Rose Miller

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Congressional Republicans Polled On Global Warming, Slam Al Gore

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| Mon Feb. 5, 2007 4:18 PM PST

Via Think Progress, we find out that the National Journal has just released a "Congressional Insiders Poll," which surveyed Congress' position on global warming. Think Progress thinks the results are startling. Unfortunately, I think they are fairly predictable. Just 13 percent of Republicans in Congress say they "believe that human activity is causing global warming." Some of the comments that follow though, are fairly amusing, like this choice one zinging Gore:

"The only Inconvenient Truth is that anyone can be a movie star, even someone as boring as Al Gore."

Ha. So that's some really pertinent insight. Thank you, Congressmen and women. The thing is, global warming is most definitely a product of human behavior and apparently, it's just the beginning of an even larger problem. According to Julia Whitty, writing today on our new environmental blog, The Blue Marble, "climate change is only one symptom of a greater disease scientists call global environmental change (GEC). Global warming is the rash. GEC is the bubonic plague."

New, Improved Environmental Destruction!

—By

| Mon Feb. 5, 2007 3:54 PM PST

BP and the University of California Berkeley announced on Thursday a public-private partnership agreement to establish the Energy Biosciences Institute. The Institute will focus on developing biofuels.

Besides just firming up BP's reputation as the most earth-friendly of the oil companies (an honor no greater than being the most Jew-friendly member of the SS) and Berkeley's reputation as a hotbed of liberalism, the announcement marked biofuels' entry into the mainstream.

I should be dancing, but I'm not. First of all, public-private partnerships: Ick. Secondly, biofuels advocates keep missing the point. Prime example: Ethanol--at least the corn-based ethanol Bush is pushing--requires an absurd amount of fossil fuel to produce. The European Union recently made a similar gaffe when it required that biodiesel be used as an additive. The Houston Chronicle reported in September that production of soy in Argentina is so rapidly that environmental groups fear deforestation and anti-poverty groups fear the food supply will be jeopardized.

Meanwhile, Craig Venter, formerly of Celera Genomics—the company that wanted to patent the human genome—is trying to manufacture, as in from scratch, an organism that would break down crops such as switchgrass that could provide ethanol more sustainably if they could be processed more efficiently.

These approaches miss the forest for the trees. Nature has its own very functional system, of which we are but a part. We do not fully understand that system, or else we would have no more need for science. We have to learn how to respect it and stay out of its way.

New, Improved Environmental Destruction!

—By

| Mon Feb. 5, 2007 3:48 PM PST

BP and the University of California Berkeley announced on Thursday a public-private partnership agreement to establish the Energy Biosciences Institute. The Institute will focus on developing biofuels.

Besides just firming up BP's reputation as the most earth-friendly of the oil companies (an honor no greater than being the most Jew-friendly member of the SS) and Berkeley's reputation as a hotbed of liberalism, the announcement marked biofuels' entry into the mainstream.

I should be dancing, but I'm not. First of all, public-private partnerships: Ick. Secondly, biofuels advocates keep missing the point. Prime example: Ethanol--at least the corn-based ethanol Bush is pushing--requires an absurd amount of fossil fuel to produce. The European Union recently made a similar gaffe when it required that biodiesel be used as an additive. The Houston Chronicle reported in September that production of soy in Argentina is expanding so rapidly that environmental groups fear deforestation and anti-poverty groups fear the food supply will be jeopardized.

Meanwhile, Craig Venter, formerly of Celera Genomics—the company that wanted to patent the human genome—is trying to manufacture, as in from scratch, an organism that would break down crops such as switchgrass that could provide ethanol more sustainably if they could be processed more efficiently.

These approaches miss the forest for the trees. Nature has its own very functional system, of which we are but a part. We do not fully understand that system, or else we would have no more need for science. We have to learn how to respect it and stay out of its way.

Men Are From Mars, But Only If They're Straight

—By

| Mon Feb. 5, 2007 3:34 PM PST

Today, AmericaBlog reported on the offensive SuperBowl commercial that aired yesterday. In it, two men, nibbling from both ends of a Snickers bar, wind up accidentally kissing, and then have to do something "manly" to neutralize the incident. Three alternate endings to the commercial were posted on a special Snickers website created by Mars, Inc. Also posted was a video of Bears and Colts team members reacting to the commercial, saying things like "That ain't right" and making faces of disgust.

Mars didn't stop there. They also posted commercials planned for the airing of the Daytona 500. In one, a man mocks what is supposed to be a gay mannerism, in another, the kissing men have to drink toxic substances in order to destroy the effects of a man-on-man kiss, and they scream and vomit while they do so. And in another, when the men decide they must "do something manly," one of them picks up a giant wrench and attacks the other, and the second man puts the first man's head under the hood of a car, and then slams the hood on his head. The Raw Story suggested this ad be named "Matthew Shepard."

The Human Rights Campaign has called on Mars, Inc. (which is owned by billionaire Republican activist families) to pull all of the ads from its website. As of now, you can get to the page, but when you click on the videos, they do not appear.

In a related story, Colts coach Tony Dungy is the honored guest at the gay-hating Indiana Family Institute's Friends of the Family banquet. Tickets for the fundraiser are $75 apiece, and it is expected to be a sell-out.

Prince Super Bowl Half Time Show: Rebuttal

—By

| Mon Feb. 5, 2007 2:24 PM PST

Oh, previous post, you could not be more wrong! My apologies for creating a new post rather than just commenting on yours, but I wanted to include some links.

Video of the actual performance:
- Part 1;
- Part 2;
- Part 3

Other reviews:
- Kelefa Sanneh in the Times
- Tom Breihan in the Village Voice

I promise I'm not just towing the critical line here when I say that I thought this performance was fantastic. (I was in a car driving up I-5 at the time so I had to watch those YouTube links after the fact, but still). I'll gladly admit that any of Prince's recorded output over the past 10 years (or more) has been forgettable at best, and that's incredibly sad considering the brilliance of his work in the 80s. But in this performance on Sunday, he utterly redeemed himself. Given the miniscule performance time, as well as the short attention span and enormous demographic range of viewers, he did the only logical thing: jam together a string of hits (his own and otherwise) like a prime-time DJ set. I don't think it's "pandering" to play a song people know, especially considering every single moment of even the most familiar numbers was altered in some way. He brought completely new melodies and a call-and-response vocal to "Let's Go Crazy," basically created a live mashup of the intro to "1999" with "Baby I'm a Star" and "Proud Mary," and injected every song with a raw, gritty power via those amazing guitar solos. Plus, considering the recent hullabaloo over black musicians playing rock music, there was something both utterly natural and deeply subversive in seeing Prince take on Foo Fighters' ubuquitous (and mediocre) "Best of You," and turn it into an almost-unrecognizably great song that straddled arena rock and gospel.

Ultimately, though, it was the casual ease with which he handled the almost unimaginable pressure of the event that made this such a riveting performance. He tossed off lyrics like he was just improvising at practice, walked away from the mic to deliver a one-handed guitar solo, and sauntered back halfway through a line like it just didn't matter. As Sanneh put it in the Times, Prince "looked as if he were getting away with something," and whether that was the knowledge that an artist once decried as obscene is giving a safe-but-thrilling performance at a venue now terrified of supposed obscenity, the thought that a quirky, diminutive experimental genius could so easily position himself squarely in the middle of the American mainstream, or just the fact that someone who went so quickly from superstardom to silly-symbol joke could come back so triumphantly, it was amazing to watch. One ticket to the Prince Las Vegas show, please.

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Dearly Beloved, We Are Gathered Here Today to Get Through This Thing Called the Super Bowl Half Time Show

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| Mon Feb. 5, 2007 1:08 PM PST

Super Bowl halftime shows are, of course, bland blimps of branding; processed cheese whiz for the widest possible audience, which no amount of excess, earnestness, or manufactured controversy can puncture. So I was surprised to feel a touch of sadness as I watched Prince roll out all the empty signifiers one would expect from a Pepsi commercial: the atonal call-and-response with "authentic" fans; the writhing Aussie twinbots, and the accessory du jour, the marching band. Prince was once so transgressive, so outsider, and so defiantly himself, and now here he was warbling feeble medley versions of 20-year-old songs. The only song that stood up to the ant-in-a-swimming-pool staging was "Purple Rain," and that was only because it always was a lighters-aloft arena power ballad anyway.

The Purple One could not even shock sartorially: In his teal frock coat and orange shirt, he looked like Little Richard dressed as a Miami Dolphins cheerleader, and although I was glad to see him strap on the purple glyph guitar for "Purple Rain," I half expected him to coax a fountain of Pepsi from it, in a nod to the fret board autoeroticism of his past live shows.

Or maybe it was just a sign of the times. Perhaps what I'm really offended by is the fact that my musical heroes are now officially irrelevant.

Iraq More Expensive than Vietnam

—By

| Mon Feb. 5, 2007 12:48 PM PST

According to the Washington Post, Bush will ask Congress today for a quarter of a trillion dollars in additional funding to cover the cost of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. The president wants $100 billion added to the $70 billion already allotted for this year, and $145 billion for next.

As the costs in Iraq spiral upward, once provocatively high estimates of the Iraq War's costs—like the one [PDF] offered late last year by Nobel Laureate Economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard's Linda Bilmes, which predicted the war would cost more than a trillion dollars—are beginning to look too conservative.

WaPo notes:

The new war spending would bring the overall cost of fighting to about $745 billion since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States -- adjusting for inflation, more than was spent on the Vietnam War.

And don't forget that what Congress earmarks for Iraq and Afghanistan only reflects a fraction of the wars' true economic burden. (See an article Stiglitz and Bilmes' penned for the Milken Insitute Review explaining their assessment of the future and human costs of the Iraq war broken down, as best they can be, into dollar and cents).

--Koshlan Mayer-Blackwell

Nowhere To Run To

—By

| Mon Feb. 5, 2007 12:37 PM PST

This weekend, the Washington Post reported on the ever-worsening refugee crisis in Iraq. Through the profile of a once-famous singer from Baghdad, the story of nearly 2 million refugees is told. Saad Ali, who has to disguise his Iraqi accent with a Jordanian dialect while living in Jordan's shadows, "teeters on the fringes of life." I have written on this crisis many times before. One of the biggest issues facing Iraqi refugees is the dearth of safe havens. Jordan and Syria have handled a disproportionate amount of this exodus, but after the 2005 bombing in Amman, Jordan essentially shut its borders and increased its surveillance of its Iraqi refugees, hence Sali's life in the shadows. Right now, the Bush administration only allows 500 Iraqi refugees to enter the country. Yup, just 500. So, really that just leaves Syria. Hence the Post's narrative:

"On Jan. 13, knots of Iraqis waited to board 14 buses to Syria...Humfash (the travel agent) makes all his passengers sign waiver forms that read: 'I am traveling on my own responsibility and God is the only one that protects us.'"

As the United Nations tries to determine what can be done, and the United States dutifully ignores the thousands of Iraqis banging down its door, Sali and his fellows Iraqi citizens are left with little hope. The U.S. can hardly get a handle on Iraq's security. The Bush administration is hoping that Petraeus will be a quick fix or an easy out, at the very least. So, if the administration can't even put in the effort, time or resources into staving off a potential proxy war or complete chaos in the Middle East (which would really be in its best interest), I highly doubt that it has any intention of saving refugees. Not to mention the political repercussions. Because if you let Iraqi refugees into our country in droves, then you are admitting their country is not safe for them. If their country isn't safe, then I think it is safe to say, we failed our mission. And this is an even more dire situation for the Shi'ites who face the most persecution in Syria and Jordan, which are both predominantly Sunni and you can be sure they'd be the very last to be granted asylum here.

Global Warming is Only One Symptom

—By

| Mon Feb. 5, 2007 12:31 PM PST

Finally the world is paying some attention to the IPCC reports. Finally there's a sort of awareness of global warming. May the global attention span stretch to meet the need.

But guess what? Climate change is only one symptom of a greater disease scientists call global environmental change (GEC). Global warming is the rash. GEC is the bubonic plague. The other symptoms are equally deadly and still barely recognized outside science. The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) lists the following:

• Half of Earth's land surface is now domesticated for direct human use.

• 75 percent of the world's fisheries are fully or over-exploited .

• The composition of today's atmosphere is well outside the range of natural variability the Earth has maintained over the last 650,000 years.

• The Earth is now in the midst of its sixth great extinction event.

This blogger first interviewed James Hansen, the father of global climate change science, in 1985. That's right. Twenty-two years ago, Hansen was trotting out his climate graphics and talking about sea level rise and carbon dioxide. Well, we don't have another 22 years to address the rest of the list. Homo sapiens rip-van-winkleus needs an infusion of Red Bull and reality.

Kevin Noone, Executive Director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, notes that the IPCC work establishes a template for the other systemic problems:

The IPCC report, with its interdisciplinary approach to climate change, is a clear example of how the Earth needs to be considered as a coupled system in order to understand global environmental change… The study of the Earth as a system, looking not only at climate but also at changes in the oceans and on land, how those changes affect each other, and the role of humans as part of that system is a crucial approach to managing a sustainable planet.