Yano, has moved Hello Kitty into a new light by digging below the surface and giving the pop culture icon her full academic due. If popular culture is prone to disposable (mostly Eastern) heroes and fads (e.g., Pokemon, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, etc.), Hello Kitty is the exception to the rule. She has dominated from East to West, in her native home of Japan all the way to Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Integrated as part of Japan’s “cute” culture (kawaii), Hello Kitty has a history all her own.
more.
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art: photo by A.C. Gomes & Son. late 19th century.
It was about a pattern of acts by a president that threatened the constitution, the law, and the Bill of Rights. Nothing happening now comes close to that.
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art: photo by Burt Glinn of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and his newborn. New York, 1959
…on behalf of the dance world, permit me to apologize for the mess you’re entering into. It’s insane. But it’s *incredibly* exciting. The world you thought you were entering into is long dead, and none of the old (anti-intellectual, super-sexist, super-classist and SUPER-racist) rules of dance history need hold true for you. So go forth. The search for new ways of moving, dancing and sustaining a career is ON. Read some books. Eat your Wheaties. Learn your dance history, and get out there and make our shared dance future.
…Carlos Fuentes is the subject of a small, literary boom on the anniversary of his death. Fuentes died one year ago [and] This week his…publisher…released more than a dozen of his works as e-books for the first time, including the epic and groundbreaking 1962 novel “The Death of Artemio Cruz.”
more.
![…[some] may not remember what made Iran-Contra such an extraordinary scandal. The Reagan administration “raised money privately” by selling weapons to a sworn enemy of the United States. Why? Because it wanted to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua. And when I say “illegal war,” I mean that quite literally—Congress told the Reagan administration, in no uncertain terms, that Reagan could not send money to the Contras. Period. The Reagan administration, unrestrained by laws and the Constitution, did so anyway, and much of the president’s national security team ended up under indictment.
more.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/9745d96274c257550523597f049fc6dc/tumblr_mmugto6Erl1qcwnv4o1_500.jpg)
…[some] may not remember what made Iran-Contra such an extraordinary scandal. The Reagan administration “raised money privately” by selling weapons to a sworn enemy of the United States. Why? Because it wanted to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua. And when I say “illegal war,” I mean that quite literally—Congress told the Reagan administration, in no uncertain terms, that Reagan could not send money to the Contras. Period. The Reagan administration, unrestrained by laws and the Constitution, did so anyway, and much of the president’s national security team ended up under indictment.
more.
The burdens of a public life, of living as a symbol of some vast and unquenched yearning, are well-known, but few among us understand with the terrible insight of the Shabazz family what it means to die that way. Malcolm Shabazz, activist, blogger, and grandson of Malcolm X, died Thursday in Mexico City at the age of twenty-eight. His is the seventh untimely death in an index of lamentation that spans four generations. For many years now it has been quietly known and seldom spoken that both Martin and Malcolm’s heirs occupy a space on the far end of some bell curve of suffering. The specifics—King’s brother drowning little more than a year after his assassination, his mother gunned down in the sanctuary where he and his father pastored, Betty Shabazz’s death after a fire in her home—seem both too crucial to forget and too cruel to recognize with any frequency.
more.
The death of Bob Marley…robs Jamaican music of its…ambassador, and popular music in general of one of its most eloquent, powerful, and conscientious voices.
“I disconnected myself to shield myself from people who would sway to my songs in the club and call me ‘nigger’ in the street. They were too busy seeing their own preconceived image of a Negro woman. The image that I chose to give them was of a woman who they could not reach and therefore can’t hurt.” —Lena Horne
she died on this day in 2010.
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art: photo of Horne by Charles “Teenie” Harris, 1944
Bill Cosby vintage varsity style.
Tyra for Yves Saint Laurent, s/s 1995
![…Carlos Fuentes is the subject of a small, literary boom on the anniversary of his death. Fuentes died one year ago [and] This week his…publisher…released more than a dozen of his works as e-books for the first time, including the epic and groundbreaking 1962 novel “The Death of Artemio Cruz.”
more.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/01077ae764096b2b7612ae887df72c20/tumblr_mmwjjbgyq91qcwnv4o1_500.jpg)
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