discussion

Translated as Ash Wednesday(restful melancholic day that follows the
annual carnival celebration in Brazil

This was the last good piece of art I saw with a little story along with it.

I went to louise bourgeois retrospective at the Tate Modern in
January. I was a little disappointed since there was a lot of hype
surrounding the show and my expectations were high. Yet my visit to
the Tate was not let down when I ventured up to the top floor to see
the film by Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander and filmmaker Cao
Guimaraes entitled Ash Wednesday/Epilogue.

I watched the 6 minute film 4 times before I left, and I began to also
watch the way people were reacting the film. Everyone was as
captivated as I was and once they walked through where the film was
projected they stopped to watch. One man who had a young boy on his
hand walked in with the intention of walking out immediately looking
exhausted and rushed most likely because he brought a six year old
into the Tate, but the little boy exclaimed enthusiastically “WOW!” he
exclaimed in such a happy and over the top way. The father stopped and
the boy sat with just as much devoted attention as the rest of the
viewers.
The whole short film is 6 minutes and this clip does not give it the
justice it deserves, but I could not find the whole video online. The
sound was taken from dropping matchsticks. The whole film shows
close-ups of ants picking up sugar coated confetti bringing it back
into their home.

this project in some sense or another sort of reminded me of the animation lecture from a couple of weeks ago, allowing kids through art to have a voice where as otherwise they would not be capable of doing so. Many of you may know the film born into brothels, which is through the same organization.
Here is their website:
http://www.kids-with-cameras.org/home/

mission statement:
Kids with Cameras is a non-profit organization that teaches the art of photography to marginalized children in communities around the world. We use photography to capture the imaginations of children, to empower them, building confidence, self-esteem and hope. We share their vision and voices with the world through exhibitions, books, websites and film. By linking with local organizations, we work to strengthen the children’s education and general well-being, providing financial support through sales of their prints or by developing our own homes with a focus on leadership and the arts.

If you have not seen born into brothels, I highly recommend watching it.

I heard about this article listening to the radio a few days ago, which I do often to get my news so that may be a common link to my posts, sorry about that. If you are interested in hearing the commentary, you can access what I heard at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19341657&ft=1&f=1057 

I am including the article below which is what the news radio segment was essentially about. If you can hear the interview with the author of the article…

Here is the article from the los angeles times

Leave Britney alone

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The young star is in a fight for her life against mental illness.

By Asra Q. Nomani
February 12, 2008

I’ll never forget the first time I saw my brother strapped to a gurney. I was just a teen, and he’d been diagnosed with schizo-affective disorder, an illness akin to schizophrenia that causes mood swings, psychosis and violent outbursts. Our family had just committed him for psychiatric treatment, and I wept, shouting into the air, “I want my brother back.” At home, my parents sobbed. But at least we went through this anguish in private.

So it’s impossible for me to find any entertainment value in the public harassment of Britney Spears, who was released from the psychiatric ward of UCLA Medical Center last week. And as a journalist, I doubt there is news value in it either.

Mental illness doesn’t always elicit compassion; it’s hard to see, so it’s hard to understand. Perhaps in the wake of Spears’ breakdown, California mental health advocates will lobby to change the state’s involuntary commitment laws so that those who are sick get treatment, even if they don’t realize how badly they need it. In the meantime, all of us should reflect on the fact that we wouldn’t be so cruel to somebody diagnosed with another disease. Would we make a sideshow of someone with a brain tumor?

It’s easy to blame the paparazzi and celebrity gossip websites, and, granted, they are the worst. TMZ promoted a video of Spears crying with the headline, “Britney Spears on Suicide Watch?” Over a photo of Spears sitting on a curb after her fight with her manager, PerezHilton.com scrawled “Britwreck.”

But the mainstream media are complicit. After Spears’ release (over the objection of her family), A.J. Hammer, host of CNN’s “Showbiz Tonight,” stumbled over the pronunciation of Spears’ supposed medications; the words “Burning Britney Questions!” rolled across the bottom of the screen. “Britney’s Mental Illness” was the cover of a recent People magazine. The Daily Telegraph’s website featured this headline: “Mad Britney Spears detoxed by doctors,” with a link, “See pictures of the drama here.”

By exploiting Spears’ moment of vulnerability, media companies have crossed the line of basic moral decency. To me, this includes Wenner Media, owner of US Weekly and Rolling Stone, which just published an expose of Spears’ mental illness, and even Barbara Walters, who recently reported on Spears’ mental health issues on “The View.”

Enough. Time Warner Inc. (parent of CNN, People, AOL and Entertainment Weekly), News Corp. (the Rupert Murdoch firm that owns Fox News and papers around the globe) and others should halt all coverage of Spears until she is healthy. Let’s leave Britney and her family alone.

Responsible journalists long ago came to the ethical determination not to publish the names of rape victims or to air the most gruesome of terrorist videos. We can do the same here. We can get off this maniacal roller coaster that is Britney Spears coverage to remember one important fact: This is a 27-year-old in a fight for her life.

My role model in this debate is photographer Nick Stern, who quit his job Feb. 1 with the Splash news agency because he couldn’t stomach shooting the Spears story any longer. “It’s not journalism. Sooner or later, someone’s going to get killed,” he told the Independent in London. “Possibly Britney herself.”

Even aspiring journalists are making the right call. At Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies, where I’m a journalism professor, senior Erin Delmore walked off the set of a campus TV talk show. “I’m so done with the Britney coverage,” she said. “End it.”

Last week, I wrote to my editor at People and told her that I couldn’t continue working as a stringer for the magazine. I’m not being holier than thou. I wasn’t always kind to my brother about his illness. I scolded and nagged him. I called him lazy when he didn’t make his bed, unmotivated when he didn’t get a job and uncaring when he forgot our birthdays. It’s taken more than 20 years for me to understand, deep within my soul, that his mental illness is like a brain tumor, or cancer, or diabetes. It is a disease. It has symptoms such as anosognosia, which means that a person doesn’t think they have an illness, and flat affect, which saps emotional expressiveness. Right now, there is no cure.

When I realized not long ago how cruel I had been, I told my brother what I now tell Britney and her family: “I’m sorry.”

Asra Q. Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is the author of “Standing Alone in Mecca.”

Those of you who were interested in the subjective atlas of Palestine lecture or the use of subjective maps I listened to a good radio broadcast that you can hear online. The text below is also taken from the website with a description of what the broadcast is about.

http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1211

110: Mapping

Five ways of mapping the world. One story about people who make maps
the traditional way—by drawing things we can see. And other stories
about people who map the world using smell, sound, touch, and taste.
The world redrawn by the five senses.

Prologue.
Ralph Gentles and five other people spend each summer creating a map
of every crack, every depression, every protrusion, every pothole in
the sidewalks of New York City. We hear why, and we hear all the
things their map does not include. Mapmaking means ignoring everything
in the world but the one thing being mapped, whether it’s cracks in
sidewalks or the homes of Hollywood stars. And, according to
cartographer Denis Wood, we live in the Age of Maps: more than 99.9
percent of all the maps that have ever existed have been made in the
last 100 years. (5 minutes)

Act One. Sight.

Denis Wood talks with host Ira Glass about the maps he’s made of his
own neighborhood, Boylan Heights in Raleigh, North Carolina. They
include a traditional street locator map; a map of all the sewer and
power lines under the earth’s surface; a map of how light falls on the
ground through the leaves of trees; a map of where all the Halloween
pumpkins are each year; and a map of all the graffiti in the
neighborhood. In short, he’s creating maps that are more like novels,
trying to describe everyday life. See some of Denis’s maps.

Denis Wood is author of The Power of Maps. (8 minutes)

Act Two. Hearing.

TAL contributor Jack Hitt visits Toby Lester, who has mapped all the
ambient sounds in his world: the hum of the heater, the fan on the
computer. (11 minutes)

Song: “Way over Yonder in the Minor Key,” Billy Bragg and Wilco

Act Three. Smell.

A story about a device that charts the world through smell—and only
smell. TAL producer Nancy Updike visits Cyrano Sciences in Pasadena,
California, where researchers are creating an electronic nose. (9
minutes)

Act Four. Touch.

Deb Monroe reports on how she has been mapping her own body through
her sense of touch. (9 minutes)

Act Five. Taste.

Jonathan Gold goes to the places on Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles that
he visited back in the early 1980s. He tells the story of how he
decided to map an entire street using his sense of taste, and how
doing this changed his life.