Letters to the Editor
Alex Douglass
Published Letters: 6 Editor's Choice: 1
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One More for the Chorus...
[Read the article: My hapless African rebel]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...of absolute disapproval. Yikes, that was bad.
Did it ever occur to Nick Wadhams (who seems, based on this piece, more hapless than the fixer he fell in with) to talk, to any one of the many excellent free-lance journalists who work in Addis? The AP used to have a couple of good local guys in addition to an expat who may or may not still be around. Did he call his Embassy's press office?
It's hard to believe he manages to get by in Nairobi; having lived in Addis myself, I can only say he's lucky he didn't get taken for yet more of a ride. Why, as Noel Coward once asked, do the wrong people travel?
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"The Britney Person"
[Read the article: "It's Britney, bitch"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]When I was a music-consuming teen, in the heady days when Punk was giving way to New Wave, we read with amusement and astonishment about Japanese pop (which we only knew first-hand about from "Pink Lady and Jeff"), and how it cycled through cute young stars on a more or less annual basis.
In J-Pop world, stars would go from being high-schoolers in some rural prefect to being topsellers, pop idols, in six months - and then in a year or so, no more, go through a vastly accelerated process of becoming Has Been and Over. Then, back to Real Life - with the feature article always trotting out some happy 30-something housewife who a decade before had been on every magazine cover in all Japan. How different we thought, from our Real Artists - Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Lene Lovich - whom we'd love forever.
As it turns out, yes and no (Elvis lives, but I'm not sure you could pay me to listen to Adam or his Ants). What we didn't know was that the U.S. would develop a malevolent version of the J-system - one without the second act (paging Mr. Fitzgerald). It's an especially toxic (prescient title), intensified incarnation of the Hollywood Studio/Sunset Boulevard system that once reigned in film.
So, what we're left with is what Hannaham points out: the bifurcated Brand and Person, with the one running along more or less smoothly and the other crashing, sometimes spectacularly. It's happened with the Boy Banders (with the rare exception of the breakout star or two) who now populate the nether regions of what passes for Reality Entertainment; it's happened with pretty much each and every Jackson; and most spectacularly, it's happening now with "The Britney Person".
2003 Britney Brand probably has a good couple of years of buzz left; more and more, though, it seem's like the best we can hope for 2008 Britney Person is that she'll still be breathing.
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Lion Meets Lamb
[Read the article: Norman Mailer 1923 - 2007]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Many years ago, in the early '80s, Mailer participated in a program that brought Eminent Persons for a week's residency at the mid-Atlantic university where I studied. The house I lived in was one of his principal hosts for the week, a dubious honor as it turned out, as he was, to be kind, a fair amount of work.
My memory of him is dominated by two things: his leading a discussion, for a religious studies class, of his book on Marilyn Monroe and of Monroe as a goddess-figure - he seemed startled by the seriousness with which we approached the actress, even though his book was without doubt one of the most solemnly portentous things I've ever had to read.
The lowpoint of the visit, though, was a post-prandial session in our dining hall, when what started out as a discussion of campus life turned into a truly Mailerian tirade on Ungrateful Youth, with an odd fixation on the fact that the recently redecorated room featured plastic chairs, a fact, he declared, that would doom us all to mediocrity. Vidal's comment - "interesting but longwinded" - was more or less spot on, at least on that occasion, if more of the latter than the former.
Looking back, I realize that I must have been a somewhat fetching young thing - aggressively androgynous, New Wave-haired and made-up, and fairly solemn myself about, to Mailer, hot-button issues like gender and (lack of) traditional masculinity. He seemed genuinely fascinated, if I say so myself, and ended the evening by saying, "Well, if you are a boy, it's a loss..."
I think I was flattered, but I'm still not sure.
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Faith and Fashion
[Read the article: Feminist hypocrisy on the hijab?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's a mistake to treat the question of hijab - or Islamic fashion in general - as if it were a single issue that stretches from LA to Lahore; it's also far more useful to address it, at least in moderate Islamic countries and in the West, as much as fashion as politics.
After all, we are not all that far away, in the grand scheme of things, from a time when our own women's fashions were every bit as loaded in terms of "respectability" as the hijab, in all its many, many variations, are today. I was brought up largely by grandmothers born in the waning days of the nineteenth century, women who had been raised in corsets and trailing dresses and who still held strong opinions about the kind of woman (definitely not a lady) who would go out without a hat and gloves, or who wore just that much too much makeup, or whose skirts approached the knee.
Having worked in the Middle East for the better part of a decade, much of it in collegiality with incredibly talented, educated, dedicated - and covered - professional women, I long for a day when the West is able to move beyond the stereotypes of burqas and repression which represents in the end the experience of only a minority of Muslim women.