Why It Matters : Society and the Arts

A New Context for the Holocaust

Newsweek — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 15:04:42 GMT

By Michael Levitin

With far-right anti-immigrant parties strengthening in Austria, and growing opposition to the mosques and minarets shooting up from Berlin to Cologne, xenophobia is in the air in Europe. Pending job losses from the financial fallout may soon make matters worse. That’s why, when violinist Daniel Hope got the idea of hosting a 70th anniversary concert for Kristallnacht in Berlin, he wanted it to be more than a remembrance of the Holocaust and World War II. “It’s also about now, about violence against foreigners and any kind of racism,” he said. “We’re at a time, in an unstable atmosphere, where we can’t afford to be looking away and watching again.”

“Tu Was!”, or “Do Something!”, which takes place Nov. 9 at the recently closed Tempelhof Airport of Nazi pride and Berlin Airlift fame, pays homage to the infamous Night of Broken Glass in 1938 when Nazis destroyed thousands of Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues, and deported 30,000 to concentration camps, in a prelude to the Holocaust. Joining the Emmy-nominated Hope—a South Africa-born, London-raised musician who studied under Yehudi Menuhin and won Britain’s 2004 Young Artist of the Year among other accolades—is a star-studded cast that includes legendary German actor Klaus Maria Brandauer (“Mephisto”), cabaret celebrity Max Raabe and the Beaux Arts Trio pianist Menahem Pressler, who himself witnessed Kristallnacht as a 15-year-old boy in Berlin. Blending music with readings, video and discussion, the multi-genre performance features songs by the so-called “Entarte” composers of the 1930s whom the Nazis deemed degenerate and subsequently destroyed.

In the current context of tensions over Europe’s Muslim population, the concert takes on an added significance. “Germany has accepted its role within this 20th century nightmare. Daniel is only able to do this concert because Germany is so open to examining its past,” said John Axelrod, the conductor of the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra who similarly played a concert at Auschwitz last year to raise awareness about the risks of racism and xenophobia. “It’s not just about Jews and Germans. It’s about Jews and Arabs. Americans and Arabs. Germans and Muslims. Americans and Russians. Music has a humanitarian purpose; it has the ability to resonate in the souls of all people regardless of culture, language or borders,” he added.

The concert, which boasts an eclectic range of jazz, rock, classical and other genres, may mark a turning point for German-Jewish relations. That, at least, is what Hope hopes. But for the grandson of German Jews who fled Berlin before the war, most important is that it serves as “a catalyst to jumpstart people’s feelings so they start thinking, start acting, so that they don't sit by ever again and watch while unacceptable things happen.” 70 years after Kristallnacht, with tensions mounting between Europe and its Muslims, Berlin is the ideal venue for this show. It is the place where it all began.

French v. American Literature: Which is Worse?

Newsweek — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 19:43:31 GMT

By Amber Haq

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, the French Mauritian winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature, is known for his quiet demeanour and solitary living. So it came as something of a surprise that the announcement today by the Nobel committee came trailing clouds of controversy. Last week Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Nobel committee for literature, told the Associated Press that American literature is "too isolated, too insular," and American writers "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture." American writers haven't been very generous towards the Nobel committee, either. "You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures," New Yorker editor David Remnick told AP.

Le Clézio, however, doesn't seem to agree with Engdhal. In an impromptu press conference today at the headquarters of Gallimard, the most prestigious publishing house in 20th Century French literature, housed in a tiny enclave of left bank Paris, the author quoted numerous American contemporaries he esteems—chief among them Philip Roth. "American literature is atypical – unlike French literature it gives rise to all sorts of states, styles and authors who are distinct."

As camera flashes went off and hordes of foreign and French journalists jostled to get a seat at the conference, Clezio also defended his compatriots. The so-called 'death of French Culture,' a label conjured by a certain American newsweekly [note from editors: not Newsweek], seems to lack any foundation in Le Clézio's understanding of things. "Some people are speaking of the decline of French culture – I was not aware of it so I don't have any answer. I deny it. It's a very rich, very diversified culture so there is no risk of decline."

Le Clézio, 68, is the first French citizen to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature since Gao Xinjian in 2000 and the first French Language writer to have won since Claude Simon in 1985. His prolific body of work includes over 30 novels, essays and short story collections. In the announcement earlier today the Swedish academy cited his breakthrough novel "Desert" published in 1980, describing its "magnificent images of a lost culture in the North African desert contrasted with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrants."

Shanghai: Pipe-dreams made real

Melinda Liu — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 21:51:57 GMT

Beijing isn't alone in its "edifice complex," the massive urban makeover that has transformed the Chinese capital in the run-up to the Summer Olympics. In Shanghai the remodeling of the city's famous Bund waterfront has led to some raised eyebrows. My colleague Duncan Hewitt writes from Shanghai:

When Shanghai does something, it doesn't do it by halves. For years, local urban planners have admitted that the city made a mistake in the 1990s, when it routed one of its major highways right along the famous Bund waterfront. Since then conservationists have dreamt of the day when the traffic would be rerouted, or even put underground in a tunnel, to spare the historic structures from pollution and improve the view of the famous old stretch of colonial-era buildings.

Yet the amount of work involved meant that such an idea seemed like, perhaps literally, a pipe-dream -- not least because Shanghai's notoriously marshy riverbanks are hardly the most ideal environment for tunnel construction (many of the Bund buildings themselves have sunk several feet in the past half century). But the World Expo, which Shanghai is to host in 2010 - the first time such an event has been held in a downtown area rather than out in the leafy suburbs - seems to have concentrated minds: last month the city announced a host of spectacular plans: the old elevated highway link which brought cross-town traffic onto the Bund would be demolished, and a network of new roads and tunnels would be built at a cost of almost a billion US dollars.

Most spectacularly, the plans include not only a traffic tunnel right underneath the Bund, but a double-decker tunnel, no less, with two layers of road carrying traffic in different directions, located just a few metres below ground in order to avoid existing subway tunnels. And the famous old Garden Bridge, a quaint steel girder structure which has carried traffic from the north end of the Bund across the adjoining Suzhou Creek for a hundred years, is to be dismantled piece by piece, cleaned and repaired, then re-erected one year later. City officials dismissed suggestions that this might be a rather excessive way of cleaning the bridge, saying that they wanted to strengthen the structure of its base, in order to enable it to "carry traffic for at least another fifty years."

For the observer, it's another of those cases where one can't help thinking: 'only in Shanghai', a city famously obsessed with grand plans - and with change in general. And this being Shanghai, officials are not wasting any time in putting the plans into practice. Barely a week after the public was first informed of the project, which will mean major upheavals in the city's traffic infrastructure while construction is underway, the builders were already at work, closing the concrete highway bridge which previously swooped down in a spectacular curve onto the Bund, tearing up the road surface along the waterfront, and beginning to dismantle the Garden Bridge.

For the first few days there were major tailbacks on Shanghai's streets, as residents struggled to find alternative routes: the city government admitted there had been problems, pledged to improve its strategies, and publicly expressed thanks to residents for their 'understanding'. But for many Shanghai citizens, this kind of sudden imposition of a major restructuring of part of their city with very little advance warning is now part of life, something they've become used to in recent years. Most shrugged their shoulders and sat in the traffic jams. "If it's not something the authorities can make money from then they'll never bother to publicise it in advance", said one cynical driver.

For the owners of the luxury designer shops and restaurants which have in recent years returned to the refurbished buildings of the Bund, there are mixed feelings. Some expressed frustration at the fact that after all the money they've invested in building their businesses, they received only very cursory consultation from the officials in charge of the reconstruction project; indeed some of those running businesses in the Bund area received no advance warning at all about a plan which could mean two years of roadworks outside their front doors. But others have set their hopes on the end result being worthwhile, with the Bund becoming a peaceful area for leisure and tourism.

Still, many such people remain a little perplexed: most automatically assumed that building a tunnel under the Bund at such vast expense was in order to allow the creation of a pedestrianised zone at ground level, which would fit perfectly with the government's official plan to turn the area into an upmarket leisure destination. But that's not quite the case, according to Qin Kangde, director of the local office in charge of tunnel and road construction: "We'll have four to six lanes of road, mostly for tourist buses and visitors to local shops and restaurants," he says. It's certainly an improvement on the current eleven lanes of traffic racing past the Bund on the way to somewhere else - and the public areas and riverbank walkway will be beautified too. But it's also a reminder that in Shanghai, home to two of China's largest auto factories, the era of the car is not quite over - even on the Bund...

A Real World Series for a Change

Christian Caryl — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 20:36:32 GMT

So who was the winner of this year's World Series? No question - it was the Japanese. Okay, so maybe the Red Sox won too. But, let's be honest - how many Red Sox fans are there in the world? 20, 30 million tops? Still can't hold a candle to 127 million Japanese, the vast majority of whom tuned in to every minute of this year's Series between the Sox and the Colorado Rockies. They were rooting not only for Boston pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, who made headlines earlier this year when he signed a $52-million contract with the club and became the first Japanese to start a World Series; they were also pulling for Rockies star Kazuo Matsui, formerly of the New York Mets. As pretty much every Japanese fan knows, Dice-K and Matsui used to be teammates on the Seibu Lions pro team back in their home country. So Japanese fans had plenty of potential drama to savor. Could Matsuzaka redeem himself by staging a comeback from his weak performance in the playoffs? Would Matsui manage to put his more famous ex-teammate in the shade - and take revenge on the hated Mets who so clearly failed to appreciate his gifts? Thanks to the Sox' victory, of course, Matsuzaka is now being hailed as a hero back at home.

Japanese baseball fans have the best of both worlds. They have one of the globe's best professional baseball leagues at home, and they can also consume their fill of U.S. baseball games shown on local TV. MLB is not unaware of the fact that the growing number of top-ranking Japanese players in the U.S. has dramatically increased Japanese interest in the sport, with Japanese TV networks playing huge sums for the right to rebroadcast games. I'm told that MLB has even been known to schedule games between teams that pit the Japanese stars against each other at times that are more convenient for a Japanese viewing audience.

We talk about globalization in often apocalyptic terms, but there couldn't be a better example of the process than professional sports. It's not only Japanese players who have migrated to the U.S.; American managers as well as players have become popular fixtures in Japanese pro baseball. Trey Hillman, the manager of the wonderfully named Nippon Ham Fighters, will be leaving hordes of worshipful fans behind as he heads on to his next job at the Kansas City Royals. (Hillman has just led the Ham Fighters into the Japan Series - and suddenly lots of folks in Kansas are paying attention to baseball in Sapporo. Who would have thought?) Matsuzaka's astronomical salary, it should be noted, is a good example of the same forces that are driving sky-high compensation for corporate CEOs. As certain global industries become, well, level playing fields, the competition to hire star performers becomes more ferocious than ever. Surely it was no coincidence that the Japanese-American baseball lovefest was happening about the same time that the National Football League held its first regular season game in London. Look for more of the same in the years to come - only more so. As for me, my money's on the Ham Fighters.

Reflection with a Brazilian Soul

Mac Margolis — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 11:05:24 GMT

What do you get when you mix Steely Dan, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell with bossa nova? Babel, you might think. But leave it to Luciana Souza, the Brazilian-born, California-based singer and composer, to bring off this unlikely mission of cultural entente - called "The New Bossa Nova" - con brio. Who better? Souza, a three-time Grammy nominee for best jazz singer, has spent most of her life straddling the hemispheres. Born to honored bossa nova composers Teresa Souza and Walter Santos, she grew up to the feathery sounds that make Brazil Brazil and that eventually caught the ears of the likes of Frank Sinatra and Stan Getz.

She honed her talent at the Berklee College of Music, in Boston, adding touches of classical theory and jazz composition to the mix. Toggling easily from the cerebral to the soulful, Souza has set poems by Pablo Neruda ("Neruda") and Elizabeth Bishop ("The Poems of Elizabeth Bishop" and "North and South") to song, reinvented famous sambas and bossa nova classics (Duos I, Duos II), and launched many of her own compositions over the last 20 years. She has also found time to perform opera for avant garde composer Osvaldo Golijov. She is featured on Herbie Hancock's latest CD, "River," due for release on September 25.

But Souza has lifted her imagination an octave for "The New Bossa Nova," produced by her husband Larry Klein, who has worked with Joni Mitchell, Madeleine Peyroux and Peter Gabriel. Each of the 12 cuts on this CD takes a bow to some of the most familiar names (for us Boomers, anyway) in the folk/pop/rock pantheon, from ex-Beach Boy Brian Wilson to Randy Newman, with a special tip of the hat to Antônio Carlos Jobim, who might just be Brazil's Cole Porter. But don't expect brassy show tunes or wah wah guitar. In Souza's delicate arrangements and occasionally melancholy vocals, pop standards like Newman's "Living Without You" and Mitchell's "Down to You" are rendered as poginant caresses. Wilson's patented uptempo "God Only Knows" becomes an oration. And even earnest old James Taylor comes off as cool as a wave washing up on Ipanema in "Never Die Young," performed in duet with Souza. "Bossa nova is all about reflection and introspection," says Souza. "This is my way of paying homage to some of the musical poets of my generation."

Listen in at www.lucianasouza.com/interview.html

Uzbek ex-convict billionaire buys world's finest Russian art collection

Owen Matthews — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 11:02:58 GMT

If you are in Central London on Tuesday or Wednesday, be sure to look into Sotheby's on Bond Street. The art collection of the late Mtislav Rostropovich, considered one of the greatest cellists of the last century, and his wife Galina Vishnevskaya is on display. The 450-odd lot of paintings, ceramics and objects d'art were due to go under the hammer tomorrow, but the auction was canceled when Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov made a successful pre-emptive bid for the entire collection yesterday. Sotheby's says that the offer was "substantially higher than the highest pre-sale expectations" -- in other words, well over the 20 million pound catalogue valuation of the collection. Russian art sales at Sotheby's have risen twenty times since 2001; this year alone the London-based auction house has sold over $101 million worth of Russian art, with another major sale planned in London on November.

Rostropovich and Vishnevskaya were passionate collectors of Russian art. Both exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974 for dissident sympathies, the couple must have felt that surrounding themselves with the finest artifacts of their homeland brought their London, Paris and New York apartments a little closer to the home they left behind in Moscow. Though they had mighty arguments over what to buy, their collective taste was impeccable. Almost all of the finest names in Russian painting are represented, from major works by Ilya Repin and Zinaida Serebyakova to Boris Grigoriev's epic and mesmerizing painting "Faces of Russia". They also had a wonderful eye for bronzes, early-19th century Imperial Porcelain Factory vases and miniatures.

Uzbekistan-born Usmanov, 54, owns major steel factories and heads a subsidiary of state-controlled energy giant Gazprom. A son of the prosecutor-general of Soviet Uzbekistan, Usmanov studied at Moscow's elite Institute for International Relations before joining the Communist Youth League (Komsomol) Propaganda Department in Tashkent. He spent six years in jail in the 1980s on charges of economic crime. According to Forbes magazine he is Russia's 23rd richest man, with estimated wealth of $5.5 billion; he also owns Kommersant, one of Russia's leading newspapers.

Usmanov has pledged that the Rostropovich-Vishnevskaya collection will return to Russia. A spokesperson for Galina Vishnevskaya sais that “We are delighted that the Collection is being acquired in its entirety. It is especially meaningful for our family that the new owner will bring it to Russia.”

Sumo of All Fears

Christian Caryl — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 05:57:25 GMT

Asashoryu, come back! We're sorry! We didn't mean it!

Somehow I don't think we're going to be hearing that collective cry from the Japanese any time soon - not after what's been going on here over the past few weeks. The media in this country have been engaged in the national trashing of a hapless 26-year-old from Mongolia. Forget his real name – he's known here only by his Japanese name, Asashoryu. He's the Grand Champion of sumo wrestling, the best in the business, with 21 tournament wins to his credit. You'd think he'd be pretty popular, and he was, for a while. But now the country's love affair with the big Mongolian has gone bad. A few weeks ago Asashoryu asked to be let off work, pleading injury – and was then spotted playing in a charity soccer match back in his home country. National outrage ensued.

It's been going on for weeks, 24/7. Asashoryu says he's depressed. Japanese commentators say he's a wimp and should be drummed out of the sport; some called for him to be placed in confinement until he apologized. (Apology is a big thing here; his refusal to show contrition probably heads the list of his sins at this point.) His wife has left him, and there's talk he's going to be charged with tax evasion. (One wonders – how come that didn't come up while he was still winning tournaments?) On August 30 he was finally allowed to head home for treatment and recuperation. It's probably the end of his sumo career.

It hasn't been pretty. And it potentially raises a lot of interesting question about sports in general, the herd mentality of the Japanese media, and the role of outsiders in Japanese society. A lot of us foreigners have been discussing whether Asashoryu's treatment has to do with the fact that he's one, too. He's not as unusual as you might think. If you include Asashoryu, there are now 61 foreigners from a total of about 700 wrestlers – and many of them are in the top rankings. Sumo is, of course, super-traditional. It's been around for centuries and many of its customs are intertwined with the national religion of Shinto. Its rules of conduct are arcane and, at times, not exactly humane. Newcomers get hazed unmercifully.

That could be one of the reasons why Japanese themselves no longer seem interested in playing along. This year the number of new Japanese nationals signing up to join the sport as new recruits was exactly zero. It seems they'd rather play baseball or soccer – the cool sports in today's Japan. Enter the foreigners.

And that's the paradox. Sumo is regarded as super-Japanese – but it can only survive if it stays global. If it were only that easy. The Japanese aren't quite as xenophobic as the conventional wisdom would have it. They can also be enthusiastic about other foreigners who come to Japan to perform high-profile jobs – like the odd senior executive or baseball coach. But sumo isn't just bound up with Japan's national narrative – it's also in crisis, a perfect example of the painful adjustments that face this country as the pressures of globalization force it confront some of its traditional ways of doing things. So someone who violates the sport's code of good behavior is asking for trouble. And Asashoryu has gained something of a reputation as a wild partier and cocky violator of sumo's hallowed rules. (That's not to say he deserves it, of course; it's hard not to feel sympathy with a 26-year-old who's had his life ruined for a relatively minor offense.)

There's something about sports that awakens deep and violent emotions in people. Perhaps it's because, for many people, athletes are the only heroes they have left. Just witness the hysteria in the U.S. when some sports idol is caught running afoul of the law – like National Football League quarterback Michael Vick, who just pleaded guilty to involvement in illegal dogfighting. (None of the people who helped him have been raked over the coals in public in quite the same way, needless to say.) Of course, the laws violated by Vick were official ones; the ones Asashoryu broke are mostly unwritten. You sort of wonder which is worse.

Black and White and Blurry in Brazil

Mac Margolis — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 14:59:42 GMT

If affirmative action in the United States has you confused, imagine what it's like in Brazil, where everything is muddier. Half a millennium of mingling by Africans, Europeans and Indians gave this New World nation a hundred faces and more colors than Crayola. (One famous national census turned up 136 terms by which Brazilians classified their complexion, from "dawn white" to "cinnamon.") The record-keepers, hoping to tidy things up, reduced the official lexicon of racial types to just five: white, oriental, indigenous, black and pardo (brown). But to this day, most Brazilians simply shrug and say they are a mixed-blooded people.

Blurry as that seems, this fluid self-image has been key to the country's identity. Now, thanks to an aggressive new brand of racial politics, the picture is about to change. That is the subject of "Brazil in Black and White," a fascinating, and disturbing, new documentary that airs on the PBS network's Wide Angle series on Tuesday, Sept. 4. (check out the trailor). It was written and produced by Adam Stepan, a longtime Brazil hand, who has a keen eye for both the beauty and the beast in Brazil. The focus is the debut of "American style affirmative action" in Brazil, by way of a new Racial Quota Law and the Racial Equality Statute, which seek to implement a sweeping system of racial preferences in unversities, the civil service and the private sector. At the vanguard is the University of Brasília, which has set aside one of every five vacancies for "Afro-descendents."

Sounds fair enough. It's been almost 120 years since slavery ended in Brazil (the last country to outlaw chattel labor, by the way) but the racial chasm still runs deep. Except on the football pitch and in music, or during the few fleeting days of Carnival, precious few of the 80 million odd black and brown Brazilians ever rise to the commanding heights. Negros (blacks) and pardos spend a third less time in the classroom than do whites, earn half their wages, and are far more likely to be out of work. It's no different at the U. of Brasília, where the student body has long been white as winter.

But like most things in Brazil, this subject is hardly black and white. In a society as mottled as this one, how do you tell who is black and who is not? (Do you take their picture and ask a race committee to decide, as the universitiy does?) Is Brazil's problem one of class or racism, or both? And do preferential quotas simply bring Brazil's "invisible issue" to the surface, as Ralph Ellison might have put it, or draw a reductive color line in the sand? Watch as the camera follows the steps of five college applicants, themselves the spitting image of this kaleidescopic country, as they express their aims and their angst in full palette.

Offering Anti-Gay Priests a Third Way

Silvia Spring — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 12:41:46 GMT

Not everyone was celebrating when Bill Murdoch and Bill Atwood were consecrated as Anglican bishops on Thursday at Nairobi's All Saints Cathedral. Well, certainly not anyone in favor of a united Anglican Commune anyway. The two American priests' decision to become bishops in Kenya signals not only their opposition to gays in the episcopal hierarchy but also a deepening division in the already fragile Anglican Church between its conservative African and liberal American branches, which have rowed ever since the U.S. consecrated its first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson, in 2003. Even at the consecration, there was no mistaking exactly what had motivated the American priests to travel to Africa. Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi said of gays, "We need to love them we need to preach to them, but not to make them lay readers, pastors, bishops."

Murdock and Atwood are not the first to defect to African congregations in protest against the American church's ordination of gay priests. Rwanda has ordained six Americans so far, Nigeria one and Uganda will ordain its first on Sunday. Though the bishops will return to oversee congregations in the U.S., they will report solely to African Archbishops. While this might not mean the end of the Anglican Church, it certainly represents a shift in momentum to an alternative power base away from the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the spiritual head of the Anglican Commune, who has had little luck keeping the peace during this debate.

Africans are more than happy to be on the receiving end of this power shift. Commentators here pointed to Thursday's ceremony as evidence that, despite being a poor continent, it serves as a beacon for morality and spiritual solace for the rest of the world. The Anglican Church in Africa is not pleased with its American branch. At a key meeting in Tanzania in February, bishops called for Americans to end the appointment of gay clergy and the blessing of same-sex couples, demanding a response by September 30.

They aren't likely to be happy with what they hear back. As recently as Tuesday the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago nominated a lesbian priest to be a bishop -- which seems clear evidence that Murdoch and Atwood's efforts will do little to counter the acceptance of homosexual priests in the U.S. If the Anglican Church does eventually split into two distinct branches, there may be little love lost.

Princess Diana: A Reputation Revisited

William Underhill — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 10:06:20 GMT

She was beautiful, glamorous and wronged. Her compassion touched the lives of millions. No other member of the Royal Family could match her universal appeal. In the words of the then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, she was "The People's Princess."

So much for the first hasty draft of history. Since then the revisionists have been at work, and with reason. It's ten years this week since Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a Paris car smash. The British nation has had plenty of time to mull the record, and it's no longer quite so sure about her legacy. The emerging wisdom is more balanced. Of course, the princess had her virtues, but she was as fallible as the rest of us. Her choice of friends was questionable, she was an expert in the dark arts of media manipulation and -- say it softly -- in private life she could be capricious and difficult.

In fact those extraordinary public displays of mourning back in '97 -- the heaped bouquets outside her Kensington Palace home, the ten-hour queues to sign the Book of Condolence -- seem a tad embarrassing now, an aberrant moment when the British forgot their mistrust of overt sentimentality. These days a cover picture of the princess no longer guarantees magazine megasales; visitor numbers at her burial site have tumbled.

The truth is that the public wasn't mourning a character they knew from life. Rather, the princess was the central figure in the much publicized slo-mo drama of the royal marriage, a story more exciting and (and less plausible) than most TV soap operas. What's clear now is that the British are quite happy with a frumpier, old-look monarchy. It's taken only a modest tweaking of the palace PR to restore the Royal Family to favor. The public likes the reassuring picture of a head of state who's above passing fashions, whether in politics or couture. Note the approval for the sympathetic portrayal of a beleaguered monarch in the film "The Queen." The media likes the glamorous; posterity sometimes prefers the dutiful.

Politics unbound

Mac Margolis — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 15:05:28 GMT

Imagine this. A sightly miss has an unseemly liaison (and a love child) with a senior legislator. The lawmaker, hoping for discretion, deploys a shadowy envoy to send her child support in the form of regular wads of cash. Then the whole affair blows up into headlines, threatening to wreck reputations, careers, and homes. A tragedy for all involved? Hardly. This is Brazil, after all, where "peccadillo" might be an anagram for "opportunity." True, as I write, Renan Calheiros is holding onto his job as senate president by his drawer strings. (Not because of his dalliance, but because of the murky finances that have come to light since.) But his onetime paramour, Monica Velloso, is on a roll. Not only has she become the toast of the tabloids, but she's reportedly weighing an offer from the Brazilian edition of "Playboy" to bare her soul and more.

She wouldn't be the first. Parlaying political scandal into centerfolds is an honored tradition here. In most countries, when public figures are caught disrobing it's probably because they've fallen prey to paparazzi or that their careers are going south -- unless your name is Britney, Lindsay, or Paris, for whom it's just part of the job description. In Brazil, getting naked is practically coronation for social climbers and -- thanks to the talent scouts at "Playboy" -- the most anxiously awaited byproduct of even the most noisome poltical or social imbroglio.

Take Brazil's landless peasants movement, best know for seizing and often trashing other people's property in the name of agrarian reform. Leave it to "Playboy" to recruit a shapely young tractor operator from behind the barricades a while back, give her a good scrub, and then shoot her in all her unalloyed glory for the amusement of millions of bourgeois readers. Then there was the honey blonde football fan who lobbed a firecracker during a Brazil v. Chile match some years ago, stopping the game (the petard landed in the Chilean backfield) and roiling the international sporting world (the goalkeeper was punished for faking injury). Faster than Ronaldinho on the pitch, "Playboy" went on the attack and promoted the "Rocketeer" to cover girl.

And who'd have thought that the massive money-for-votes scheme that virtually paralyzed the Brazilian legislature a couple years back could generate anything more than indictments and a good Bronx cheer? You guessed it. "Playboy" was there again, raking the mud for roses. They picked Camilla Amaral, a young aide to a congressional investigator who shed her clothes in the capital's streets a stone's throw from where the politicians wash theirs.

What is it about delinquency that calls for nudity? Rank opportunism, perhaps. Or maybe it's the publishing industry's idea of diversion in a society all too accustomed to cheescake politics. According to the latest Veja, the nation's biggest news magazine, only a couple of the 240-odd suspects fingered for taking payola, peddling votes, or helping themselves to the public purse since 2003 are now in jail.

Impropriety for impropriety, Brazilian politics beats the girlie magazines hands down.

A Mexican Icon To Rival Che Guevara?

Joseph Contreras — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 21:33:36 GMT

It began, at least for the world at large, with the 2002 biopic that starred Mexico's very own Salma Hayek as the tortured Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Hollywood's imprimatur made it officially cool to climb aboard the bandwagon of Fridamania, and the rush to cash in hasn't ceased since: Vogue and Harpers Bazaar ran Frida-themed fashion spreads that same year, Madonna started collecting some of her under-appreciated (and presumably under-priced) paintings, and a trendy Mexico City hotel unveiled a Frida Kahlo suite priced at $550 a night that featured a refrigerator emblazoned with a larger-than-life likeness of the deceased artist decked out in a trademark indigenous costume. Now the cultural establishment of Frida's native land has, however belatedly, decided to welcome her into Mexico's rich artistic pantheon on the centennial of her birth: a major retrospective exhibition modestly entitled "Frida Kahlo 1907-2007: National Homage" opened last month in the local equivalent of Carnegie Hall, Mexico City's ornate Palace of Fine Arts, to great fanfare and fawning reviews in the national and international news media.

One wonders what Frida herself might have made of this rather self-conscious tribute to an artist who spent most of her all too brief adulthood in the shadows of her more celebrated, on-again off-again husband Diego Rivera. The chronicallly ill Kahlo did stage exhibitions of her distinctive portraiture in New York and Paris, but the only solo show of her paintings inside Mexico took place in 1953, a year before her death at the age of 47. In real life there was nothing remotely Hollywood-esque about Frida, a card-carrying member of the Mexican Communist Party who made her last public appearance at a demonstration protesting the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of a left-wing government in neighboring Guatemala. For those of us who live in Mexico City, it is a bit unseemly to behold her unibrowed visage adorning so many posters and glossy magazine covers. Cubans must have similarly mixed emotions every time they see Alberto Korda's legendary snapshot of Che Guevara presiding at a 1960 press conference in Havana. Before his death, Korda sued the Swedish vodka maker Absolut to halt its plans to use his iconic image of Che in a forthcoming promotional campaign. Korda won his case, and let's hope the relatives of Frida and Diego will display similar backbone if and when some high-rent cosmetics manufacturer comes up with the bright idea of invoking Kahlo to market eyebrow pencil.