July 2010
5 posts
Class in Revolutionary Contexts
That is a really portentous title to what is a thin little complaint about a moment in an otherwise exciting and fascinating essay on Osip Mandelstam in the New York Review of Books by Jose Manuel Prieto and a similar moment in Marjane Satrapi’s film version of Persepolis. Prieto discusses Mandelstam’s fatal poem Epigram against Stalin in which the poet condemns the dictator and the...
Drawing Copies
I haven’t talked much about “art” on this page. Below are three copies of drawings I’ve done in a class. The photo interface is strange to me, the “original” image I pulled from web sites alternates with my drawing.
May 2010
2 posts
The TOC of the new Medical Anthropology →
This TOC is from the current issue of the journal Medical Anthropology which was originally posted by Somatosphere. I can’t figure out how to “track back” to them so they aren’t getting the credit they deserve. This is also a bid for self-promotion because I have an article in this issue.
Marina Abramovic Retrospective at MOMA
On Saturday (May 8) I went to the Marina Abramovic Retrospective on the sixth floor of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The exhibit is laid out in several rooms of increasing intensity. In the first gallery room are video panels - including one which dominates the space and has Marina vigorously (violently) brushing her hair. In the second room are a series of videos of her performances...
April 2010
3 posts
Problems with the Warrior Transition Units -...
I mentioned to a friend that I’d written about this: well, what I said was that I had talked about it a bit, but could not screw up the courage to offer any interpretation. His response was, to paraphrase, ‘with the economy no one has any interest in what’s happening to these soldiers.’
This might be the case, but I think one other reason that this story does not have the...
Problems with the Warrior Transition Units
On Sunday April 25, 2010 the New York Times published a lengthy story exposing problems with the Warrior Transition Unit (WTU) system that the Army uses to contain and support soldiers who are currently in treatment in a variety of military treatment facility settings. The WTU is a relatively recent formation that was designed in the wake of the February 2007 Walter Reed scandal which was...
How To Train Your Dragon
So, I am a little embarrassed that my first post is about the film How To Train Your Dragon but it was so much fun to watch the other night. The two features of it that I particularly enjoyed was its progressive gender politics. There was no discernible gendered division of labor (there even seemed to be two leaders of the Vikings - though the man, Stoick the Vast, was the more significant) men...
