extrafenestrated II

Sat, 25 May 2013 09:54:19 +1200

Ohayo gozaimasu! Thanks to jetlag I can enjoy the city at...

Wed, 22 May 2013 19:24:00 +1200

Ohayo gozaimasu!

Thanks to jetlag I can enjoy the city at 6:30am.

The joggers, kids going to school, municipal gardeners, folks taking their dogs out for their morning relief…

home smell

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:40:00 +1200

arriving in a quiet Tokyo neighborhood at night

it rained a couple days ago

soft dry warm unscented smell of

clean in the apartment

as home as it gets for me

Ethical Fashion? NPR radio program

Fri, 03 May 2013 12:51:00 +1200

Ethical Fashion? NPR radio program:

Since a garment factory collapsed last month in Dhaka, killing more than 400 people, ethical fashion has been in the spotlight. Elizabeth Cline, author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Price of Cheap Fashion, explains the economy that created this tragedy and what we can do to fix it.

intriguing, informative, very important radio program on NPR. it´s about “fast fashion” and where are clothes come from. the questions don’t get very critical/tough though, I really wished they would have asked “but WHY are these companies willing to sacrifice human life in order to maximize profits?” they almost get there, but not quite.

click for short video -- how ads portray gender

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 06:55:00 +1200

click for short video -- how ads portray gender:

for the younger generation,
how advertisement creates our identity and desires.

No Rich Child Left Behind

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:08:00 +1200

No Rich Child Left Behind:

Unfortunately we haven’t progressed much from the reality Bourdieu explored in “Unequal Education and the Reproduction of the Social Division of Labor.” (1971)

candy-coated autumn is here on the red brick sidewalks

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:46:00 +1200

candy-coated autumn is

here on the red brick

sidewalks

April 27, 2013: Students Step Up to Offer Integrated Prom in Georgia, U.S.

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 01:55:00 +1200

April 27, 2013: Students Step Up to Offer Integrated Prom in Georgia, U.S.:

Imagining what it might feel like to be African-American in rural Georgia…

Waya Island and Lautoka Side B June 2012

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 13:04:00 +1200

Waya Island and Lautoka Side B

June 2012

Frog is imagining Toad has already made the transpacific trip to the tiny snowed-in town where he...

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 15:43:00 +1300

Frog is imagining Toad has already made the transpacific trip to the tiny snowed-in town where he obtained a position as a literature teacher for gifted tadpoles. Even though the move won’t really happen until Autumn, in Frog’s imprudent mind Toad is already there—in a modest apartment, already living his mundane life as a literature teacher. He is serving himself a bowl of soup and rice for dinner. Puts them on a tray and takes them into a living room where he turns on the television, slowly eats, and stares at the glass screen. He will watch the television for one half hour or so, until his eyes start to roll to the side. Then Toad will get up, carry the tray to the kitchen, and without washing the dishes or going to the toilet, he will immediately fall into bed. And with closed eyes Toad will sluggishly tuck a thick down blanket around him and disappear into a sound sleep. At 6:00 his alarm clock will sound (really a very plain and boring alarm clock, nothing descriptive about it). Then he will prepare for another day at the school.

Frog thinks Toad is already there, in the same latitude, sharing a parallel evening and similar climate. Frog imagines, “if I were to get into the car right now, and start driving, I could arrive at Toad’s apartment at 4am!…Although that might startle Toad…”

But it won’t, because, as I mentioned, Toad is not there yet. (And also, frogs can’t drive.)

And so I told Frog, “be patient, my friend, Autumn will come soon.”

both/and

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 13:47:00 +1300

“…set aside the demands to make an either/or choice and contemplate instead the possibility of both/and also logic…”

—E. Soja - Third Space

“In ancient times people weren’t simply male or female, but one of three types : male/male, male/female or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangment and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everyone in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing half.”

— H. Murakami - Kafka on the Shore

Andaluces de Jaén sung by Paco Ibáñez. Lyrics (poem) written by...

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 16:39:00 +1300

Andaluces de Jaén sung by Paco Ibáñez.

Lyrics (poem) written by Miguel Hernández, poet, died in 1942 in a Francoist jail, Spain.

—————————————

Andaluces de Jaén
aceituneros altivos
decidme en el alma quién
quién levantó los olivos,
andaluces de Jaén.
Andaluces de Jaén.

No los levantó la arada
ni el dinero ni el señor,
sino la tierra callada
el trabajo y el sudor,
unidos al agua pura
y a los planetas unidos,
los tres vieron la hermosura
de los troncos retorcidos,
andaluces de Jaen.

Andaluces de Jaén
aceituneros altivos
decidme en el alma de quién
de quién son esos olivos,
andaluces de Jaén.
Andaluces de Jaén.

Cuántos siglos de aceitunas
los pies y las manos presos,
sol a sol y luna a luna
pesan sobre vuestros huesos,
Jaén lévantate brava
sobre tus piedras lunares,
no vayas a ser esclava
con todos tus olivares,
andaluces de Jaén.

Andaluces de Jaén
aceituneros altivos
decidme en el alma de quién
de quién son esos olivos,
andaluces de Jaén.
Andaluces de Jaén.

Iraq, Sandy Hook and America

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 08:02:05 +1300

Iraq, Sandy Hook and America :

“Adam Lanza fired 154 rounds in less than five minutes during his rampage at Sandy Hook, amounting to one shot fired every two seconds. A number of his victims were dismembered by the barrage, literally cut in half. He only had to reload four times as he unleashed those 154 shots, because of the size of the magazines he was packing.

Facing this, we are incapable of summoning a response to address it. The very fact of it fades, because we are Americans, and well-trained to forget.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were massacred, whole neighborhoods were razed to the the ground - men, women, children, all turned into hamburger and stains on the wall - in a war that was nothing more or less than an act of deliberate murder that paid out trillions of dollars to the friends of the perpetrators. Tens of thousands of American soldiers are either dead - on the battlefield and by their own hand here at home - or crippled, or deranged by PTSD, or unemployed in the rampaged economy they came home to, facing a VA system utterly overwhelmed by the avalanche of their plight.”

Iraq Left with Mass Displacement & Epidemic of Birth Defects and Cancer

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 07:43:57 +1300

Iraq Left with Mass Displacement & Epidemic of Birth Defects and Cancer

san diego airport

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 06:58:00 +1300

warm clean temperature
palm trees outside
big glass windows
sipping a hazelnut frappuccino
sleepy eyes
searching the crowd for a
big white bear.

more comfortable than flying less oil-dependent than driving +...

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 15:35:37 +1300

more comfortable than flying
less oil-dependent than driving
+ free internet!

#amtraksurprises

(Manhattan and my random seatmate Nobel Prize Laureate Armatya Sen speaking in the background.)

fucktheory: Let’s Talk About This. (click for the Jezebel post,...

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 14:12:22 +1300

fucktheory:

Let’s Talk About This.

(click for the Jezebel post, and click for the original article in the Daily Princetonian)

No, really.
Let’s talk about this.

I fail to understand how so many of you can be so passionately committed to the human rights of subaltern peoples all around the world but completely fail to give a fuck about the consistent - not occasional, not rare, consistent - rape of your daughters, your sisters, your cousins, and your friends. This is not to say that you should care about rape victims because they’re your daughters or your friends - people shouldn’t get raped because people shouldn’t get raped. Period. But it is to express deep puzzlement regarding how you could care less about people you know or are related to. That’s what’s mystifying to me. I’m not asking you to care about this, I’m asking why you don’t care about this but you do care about other stuff, like bus segregation in Jerusalem, which, you know, is clearly a big issue for you in your personal life.

Because here’s the thing: the most horrifying statistic isn’t that 1 in 6 undergraduates at Princeton report forcible penetration or sexual assault. It’s that the national average is 1 in 5. Yes. That’s the part that’s really shocking.

So why am I so upset about the Princeton report? The answer is the explanation given by Amanda Sandoval, the Director of the Women’s Center at Princeton, when she was asked why the report was never released. I quote Jezebel:

Amada Sandoval, Director of the Women’s Center, said the results probably weren’t released because it wouldn’t be fair for Princeton to get bad press when college campuses around the country experience the same rates of rape and sexual assault but don’t publicly announce them.

“Anything about Princeton goes international, practically, and no other universities do that, so does Princeton want to be the one to say that this many of our students are sexually assaulted? I don’t think so,” Sandoval said, adding that she thought there was no “real benefit” to releasing it because “a story that Princeton’s rates of students who have been assaulted is on line with national averages is really not a story” and “in this news environment, people would make a big deal about it.”

That seems like very faulty logic given that the point of the survey was not to encourage high school students to apply to Princeton’s awesome rape-free campus but to help the University “assess the need for survivor support and education services and to utilize the information to improve prevention techniques on the Princeton campus,” according to the data summary.

Did you all follow that? The report wasn’t released, according to the Director of the Women’s Center, because it might have accidentally brought attention to the issue that the report was intended to bring attention to. And because women are getting raped everywhere all across the country, it’s OK to be in denial about it.

Now, here’s the thing. I’m not an economist or lawyer or anything important. I’m just a teacher. But I teach at a top-tier school on the East Coast, which means that the students at Princeton are my students’ peers and the teachers at Princeton are my peers. And as a teacher who teaches at this level of the education hierarchy, I think that responsibility starts with us. I think responsibility starts at the top, with the institutions that have the most money, are most lawyered-up, are most immune to public opinion, and continually run bullshit press releases about being leaders in higher education.

And as a teacher who teaches at this level of the education hierarchy, I think my peers, the ones who teach these students, should be at least as outraged about this as about that little girl getting called a “cunt” a little while ago. And they should definitely be reporting this as heavily as they reported that episode of Girls where they quoted F. Scott Fitzgerald. Why aren’t they? Simple - because you can’t criticize Princeton publicly and expect to be invited for a guest professorship, right?

Why isn’t Jasbir Puar writing about this? Why isn’t Judith Butler writing about this? Where are all the outraged radical feminists when shit like this turns up in their own back yard? Nationwide, 1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted during their time in college. I’m sitting here and calculating in my head how many of my students have been raped already or will be raped before they graduate, and I can’t in good conscience not say anything. I just wish I understood why more of my peers don’t feel the same way.

Video

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 02:38:57 +1300

how many slaves are currently working for you?

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 16:37:00 +1300

how many slaves are currently working for you?

Dreaming can create empathy.

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 02:41:00 +1300

I’m often thinking about what creates empathy. This morning I woke up with the sleepy realization that, 2 years after the historic tsunami in Japan — the ocean water had been freezing cold. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before…
Dreaming can create empathy.

extrafenestrated II

Ohayo gozaimasu! Thanks to jetlag I can enjoy the city at...

home smell

Ethical Fashion? NPR radio program

click for short video -- how ads portray gender

No Rich Child Left Behind

candy-coated autumn is here on the red brick sidewalks

April 27, 2013: Students Step Up to Offer Integrated Prom in Georgia, U.S.

Waya Island and Lautoka Side B June 2012

Frog is imagining Toad has already made the transpacific trip to the tiny snowed-in town where he...

both/and

Andaluces de Jaén sung by Paco Ibáñez. Lyrics (poem) written by...

Iraq, Sandy Hook and America

Iraq Left with Mass Displacement & Epidemic of Birth Defects and Cancer

san diego airport

warm clean temperature palm trees outside big glass windows sipping a hazelnut frappuccino sleepy eyes searching the crowd for a big white bear.

more comfortable than flying less oil-dependent than driving +...

fucktheory: Let’s Talk About This. (click for the Jezebel post,...

Video

how many slaves are currently working for you?

Dreaming can create empathy.

I’m often thinking about what creates empathy. This morning I woke up with the sleepy realization that, 2 years after the historic tsunami in Japan — the ocean water had been freezing cold. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before… Dreaming can create empathy.

warm clean temperature
palm trees outside
big glass windows
sipping a hazelnut frappuccino
sleepy eyes
searching the crowd for a
big white bear.

I’m often thinking about what creates empathy. This morning I woke up with the sleepy realization that, 2 years after the historic tsunami in Japan — the ocean water had been freezing cold. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before…
Dreaming can create empathy.