Whatever your political leanings may be, you have to sympathize with the Bush family today as a sentient being existing in the Internet age after a hacker leaked a ream of their correspondence to The Smoking Gun. You probably share too much personal information over e-mail (can I get an amen, Davey P.?) and God knows that G-chat holds enough secrets to end half the relationships in the United States (that’s a conservative estimate).
In July 2011, equipped with his sketching tools, a camera, borrowed Kevlar, and Dragon Skin body armor, illustrator Victor Juhasz arrived in Kandahar, Afghanistan, to embed for three weeks with Major Shane Mendenhall and his medevac unit, the 1-52nd Arctic Dustoff out of Fairbanks, Alaska, as well as members of Alpha Company 7-101 from Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Juhasz had participated in the United States Air Force Art Pro- gram for several years, document- ing in drawings various Air Force operations on bases around the U.S. and overseas. This independent trip, with extended time in a war zone, would give him a chance to do more. “Rendering planes in the sky or on the ground had not been what drew me to the program,” Juhasz writes. “I was looking to draw real people who happen to be warriors; to witness and create images both on the spot and back in the studio telling their stories.” Presented here is a sampling of his work and observations from his trip.
Whether through sheer coincidence or masterful timing, the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Broadway revival of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People opened last Thursday in the wake of Occupy Wall Street’s first anniversary. When the play’s main character, Thomas Stockman (Boyd Gaines) declares that “the enemy is the liberal-minded majority,” it’s as though he were speaking directly to the audience of polite theatergoers who sit idle as their own government takes advantage of them.
Director Doug Hughes reinforces the connection by aiming Stockman’s climactic speech at the audience, where an ensemble playing townspeople sits in the first row. It’s a rare bit of bravura from a director known for his understated, yet emotionally powerful productions like 2005’s Doubt, for which he won a Tony Award. British playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s snappy adaptation, first produced in London’s Arcola Theatre in 2008, drives the point home with a few loose translations alluding to modern times. The result is that an 1882 play about a Norwegian resort town whose doctor discovers toxins in its medicinal baths, and the mayor who connives to turn everyone against him despite being the doctor’s brother, feels like a parable about the ways an apathetic majority can be duped into working against the principles of justice.
If you listen to music too soon after reading David Byrne’s new book, How Music Works, especially Chapter 5 (how recording studios shape what we hear), Chapter 6 (how collaborations shape what we hear), and Chapter 7 (how recording budgets shape what we hear)—you might be in for a disorienting experience, like watching a magic show after you’ve been taught all the tricks.
I happened to put on Fiona Apple’s The Idler Wheel, an album I’ve enjoyed repeatedly over the past few months. Suddenly, instead of the songs I’d come to know by heart, with their minimalist but emotionally brutal stabs at self-analysis that it took Apple seven years to complete, I heard an assembly of parts. I became obsessed with microphone placement and where each song was recorded, debated whether I was hearing an upright piano or an electronic keyboard, tried to picture the number of musicians, imagined Apple’s writing process (words first? music first? spread out over seven years or in spurts?), and wondered what it cost to make something sound so expensive yet so lean.
As some of you know, there is far more to the Tibetan diaspora than the Dalai Lama. More than 200,000 refugees are living, sometimes stateless, in other countries. Tenzin Dorjee, whom I've mentioned here before, is the director of Students for a Free Tibet and one of the next generation of Tibetan leaders in exile. Last week, he wrote at TheHuffington Post about an incredibly moving art project, conceived after activist and artist Tenzing Rigdol's father died in exile longing to see his homeland one more time:
Texts From Hillary Clinton, a Tumblr that imagined the Secretary of State smacking down fools by way of smartphone, may have set a new speed record for the lifecycle an internet meme. The Tumblr went up, went viral, went big media, and then ended within a week after Clinton herself entered a submission, making it literally impossible for the blog to top itself any longer. Unless the internet changes its ways in the near future, this record will likely be topped by the end of the year, but at least one legacy of the whole experiment will live on. The whole thing neatly demonstrated how much Clinton’s reputation has morphed in the past four years, turning her from the frumpy mom figure to an icon of D.C. cool.
At the height of the 1990s supermodel boom, Linda Evangelista famously said of herself and her catwalk colleagues, “We don’t get out of bed for less than $10,000.” While Evangelista and her cohort, which now includes household names like Gisele Bundchen and Heidi Klum, commanded six-figures for their photo shoots, the reality for most working models then and now is that they earn close to the minimum wage and face long hours in unregulated working conditions. Models, many of whom are teenage girls, are also vulnerable to sexual harassment and pressure to pose nude.
Up for four Academy Awards on February 26 and Woody Allen's biggest box-office hit ever, Midnight in Paris seems likely to overtake even 1977's Annie Hall as the man's most beloved movie. And I wish I could belove it myself, honest I do. In this case, it's no fun to disparage the core audience's genuine pleasure.
You’d be forgiven if, like me, you spent several years avoiding ABC’s ballroom dancing contest show, Dancing With the Stars. It belongs to that saccharine genre of reality show geared toward “families,” which usually means it’s sterilized and scrubbed until there’s nothing left to either like or be offended by. It’s a cousin of the ready-to-be-euthanized American Idol. Its pen pal is the British show Britain’s Got Talent, which gave us Susan Boyle. This genre has a lot to make up for.
When the doors swung open this morning on Alice Walton’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas—funded to the tune of $1.4 billion by the Walton Family Foundation—one of its prize possessions was Norman Rockwell’s iconic World War II-era painting of Rosie the Riveter. The painting features a confident, insouciant Rosie on her lunch break, eating a sandwich, with a riveting gun on her lap, a copy of Mein Kampf that she uses as a footstool, and an American flag fluttering in the background.
Urban Outfitters' formerly "Navajo" hipster panty. AP Photo/Matt York
Urban Outfitters, the retail mecca for once and future hipsters, recently scrubbed its website of all references to “Navajo.” What was once the “Navajo Print Fabric Wrapped Flask” is now the “Printed Fabric Wrapped Flask”; the “Navajo Hipster Panty” is now the “Printed Hipster Panty”; and so on. The items are still available for purchase, but they’ve all been renamed.
Dahlia Lithwick writes about Prop 8 supporters effort to disqualify Judge Vaughn Walker, who ruled that Prop 8 was unconstitutional, because he is gay and in a committed relationship:
And what of the argument that Judge Walker stood to benefit personally from his own ruling in the Prop 8 case? Wouldn't—by this logic—a straight judge similarly stand to benefit from a ruling upholding Prop 8? Certainly under the plaintiffs' theory of the case (i.e., that every last heterosexual in America will be harmed by legalizing gay marriage) wouldn't a straight judge have been forced to recuse herself as well to avoid the possibility of personally benefitting from her ruling?
The second entry in the J.J. Abrams' reboot doesn't have the fun of the first outing, and all that's left is one more humongazoid, cluttered summer blockbuster whose gobbledygook plot just spackles over the interludes between kaboom-happy CGI set pieces.
