Anyone know what law these dancers were violating, since the arresting officer apparently doesn’t know (or won’t say)?
Update: This article/post gives you the backstory. It explains that the dancers were “there protesting a … court decision [handed down] earlier this month that upheld a ban on dancing within the memorial.” The members of the “civil danceobedience” were charged with demonstrating without a permit, and then released a short time after. That’s the answer to the question, in short…
The culture wars wage on. Almost twenty years after the great Murphy Brown debate, we’re still going at it. But now, instead of debating the pros and cons of single motherhood, the focus has turned to whether Michelle Obama erred in inviting the rapper Common to the White House Poetry Night last week. (See his actual performance here.) Critics point to this 2007 YouTube video, A Letter to the Law, though they don’t necessarily listen until the very end. And they also flag his sympathetic words directed toward Joanne Chesimard (aka Assata Shakur), an ex-Black Panther, convicted of killing a New Jersey police officer in 1973. This all built up to the latest Jon Stewart — Bill O’Reilly faceoff, which drilled down to the question: Did the First Lady make a major gaffe? Or is this another case of selective outrage? Part 1 is above; Part II is here…
Just last month, Bob Dylan played his first concert in China at the Worker’s Gymnasium in Beijing. It wasn’t exactly a big show. Roughly 2,000 people attended, but it became a big affair at home when NYTimes columnist Maureen Dowd wrote a caustic op-ed, accusing Dylan of playing a censored set stripped of his revolutionary anthems. In short, she declared, Dylan went to China and sold out his 60s soul:
Iconic songs of revolution like “The Times They Are a‑Changin,’ ” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” wouldn’t have been an appropriate soundtrack for the 2,000 Chinese apparatchiks in the audience taking a relaxing break from repression.
Spooked by the surge of democracy sweeping the Middle East, China is conducting the harshest crackdown on artists, lawyers, writers and dissidents in a decade. It is censoring (or “harmonizing,” as it euphemizes) the Internet and dispatching the secret police to arrest willy-nilly, including Ai Weiwei, the famous artist and architect of the Bird’s Nest, Beijing’s Olympic stadium.
Dylan said nothing about Weiwei’s detention, didn’t offer a reprise of “Hurricane,” his song about “the man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done.” He sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left.
Now, in a note to fans, Dylan took the rare step of responding to these (and other) accusations in a short letter published yesterday. He writes:
As far as censorship goes, the Chinese government had asked for the names of the songs that I would be playing. There’s no logical answer to that, so we sent them the set lists from the previous 3 months. If there were any songs, verses or lines censored, nobody ever told me about it and we played all the songs that we intended to play.
I’m guessing this response will only partly satisfy Dowd. Perhaps Dylan didn’t change his set to please the apparatchiks. But did he miss an opportunity to make the right statement? Just maybe. But no matter, we’re putting this behind us and getting ready for Dylan’s 70th birthday on May 24. We still love him, warts and all…
Much has been said, tweeted and written about the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, glorifying it as one of the most landmark triumphs of freedom in recent history. Yet the Western media has delivered surprisingly little on its aftermath, leaving the lived post-revolution reality of the Egyptian people a near-mystery.
This beautiful short film by British film studio Scattered Images offers a rare glimpse of a phoenix still struggling to rise from the ashes of oppression. With incredible visual eloquence, the film peels away at the now-worn media iconography of the revolution itself, revealing how life after it has actually changed — or hasn’t — as Egypt remains a nation in transition, with a future yet to be decided.
Politically, there is a vacuum. The revolution demanded a government accountable to the people and ruled by transparent institutions. But now, the only ruler is uncertainty.
Maria Popova is the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings, a curated inventory of cross-disciplinary interestingness. She writes for Wired UK, The Atlantic and DesignObserver, and spends a great deal of time on Twitter.
We’re often obsessed with oil. A year ago, the issue was offshore drilling. The Deepwater Horizon rig had exploded, and crude oil was spilling into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of 53,000 barrels a day. We all watched helplessly as BP threw everything but the kitchen sink at the problem. (Remember the golf balls?) Three months passed and 4.9 million barrels ripped into the ecosystem before the well was finally capped. Time to talk about it? Hardly. Now the discussion has moved on to skyrocketing oil prices and the issues surrounding them, like the causes (conflict in the Middle East, rising consumption in China and India, commodity speculation at home…) and the political implications for the 2012 U.S. presidential election if gas prices stay high. Weighty issues, to be sure. But before we allow the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 to fade into our collective amnesia, Chris Harmon, a Brooklyn-based designer, animator and writer, has created a work of animated typography to put some of the staggering facts into perspective.
It’s news and it’s instant historical footage. Tonight, President Obama announced that Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, was killed Sunday by US forces in Pakistan, right outside of Islamabad (and, in a fortified mansion, no less). The US began searching for bin Laden back in 1998, following the bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. 13 years later, the pursuit of Al Qaeda’s leader is over…
I can’t say that we’ll be watching the royal wedding. But we should at least put a thin veneer of intelligence on top of the shallow spectacle. That’s our job. In two very quick minutes, Emory historian Patrick Allitt sketches out the history of royal weddings, and tells you why this “Royal Willding” stands out…
On Monday, April 18th a 22-year old woman named Chrissy Lee Polis was severely beaten by two teenagers at a McDonald’s in Baltimore, while several bystanders watched and a McDonald’s employee videotaped the whole incident. Late last week, the video went viral, and now the employee has been fired, the two girls (one of whom is only 14) are in custody, and Polis is considering a civil suit. The victim, who is transgendered, told the Baltimore Sun this weekend that she considers the beating a hate crime.
Meanwhile, the incident has elicited several comparisons to the famous 1964 case of Kitty Genovese, a young woman who was stabbed to death in the courtyard of her New York City apartment building while 38 neighbors watched and did nothing to help her. The widespread coverage of her case had a huge impact on both policy and the field of psychology: The NYPD reformed its telephone reporting system; researchers began studying the bystander effect and diffusion of responsibility; and the dead woman became a symbol of the dire consequences of inaction.
One of the most elegant uses of that symbolism is the chapter (above) from the online motion comic based on the graphic novel Watchmen. Genovese figures prominently in the origin story of the superhero/antihero Walter Joseph Kovacs, aka “Rorschach.” Rorschach constructs both his identity and his costume as a direct response to the passivity and even cynical voyeurism embodied by the neighbors who heard and watched her die.
But the actual reactions of the witnesses to Kitty Genovese’s murder were more complicated than originally reported. It’s unlikely, for example, that any of the infamous 38 bystanders heard the entire crime, or realized its severity in the moment. For a fascinating account of the discrepancies between the facts and myths of the case, you can listen to this 2009 story on NPR, or read this 2007 article from American Psychologist (the link is to a PDF from the author’s website).
The Kitty Genovese parable is no less morally instructive for being not quite accurate. The bystander effect is still real, the McDonald’s worker’s decision to tape the beating last week rather than stop it is still reprehensible. And of course, Rorschach is still one of the most righteous dark avengers in popular culture. But it’s worth remembering that we’re more likely to learn from our mistakes when we dig for the truth, even — and perhaps especially — when the truth isn’t so simple.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly
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