SPEECHLESS

Prompted, we believe, by the posting of CIRCLE JERKS, about the Vienna Philharmonic's sexist prancing, two messages showed up in our email bag. First this one, from Rex Bruce, the director of the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, about an exhibition with a title hinting of ... well, you figure it out ...

CHARLIE THUMB © 2005 by Charlie Siebert"UNBOUND"

Nov. 10-Dec. 3, 2005
Opening Reception: Thursday Nov. 10, 7-9 pm

"Unbound" features four women artists from Los Angeles working with video and digital imaging. These artists explore the shadowy side of the female psyche in relationship to woman's bodies and minds searching to transcend a largely male dominated culture and the limitations of traditional gender roles.

And then came this one, from the Webmaster of a site that shall remain nameless:

Hi!

Still thinking which women make better wives? Considering Latinos, Filipinos, Asians?

We don’t want to seem meddlesome but RUSSIAN women are the first ones to be considered! Why??? As some guys say, “Go with the Russians! They will cook, clean and do anything else you want…”

More than that -- it is absolutely impossible not to admit (we can’t help mentioning) the exceptional beauty of Russian girls! Look at those slim bodies, long tanned legs, wasp waists, tempting looks …

We are speechless.

We are also reminded of VPO Watch, an advocacy project of the International Alliance for Women in Music organized and posted by Monique Buzzarté. We should have noted it before. Anyone interested in the media coverage of the Vienna Philharmonic and the status of women will find it invaluable.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

November 8, 2005 8:45 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by Straight Up | published on November 8, 2005 8:45 AM.

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