The Uncovered World of Roman Vishniac

Ilana Payes — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 14:56:39 +0000

Vishniac’s archive is being acquired by the International Center of Photography. The collection — which includes thousands of negatives taken during forays into Jewish communities in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia, along with reams of correspondence and personal documents —But the center will not only be acquiring Vishniac’s entire life’s work; as the father-son spread suggests, it is also inheriting a fascinating set of ambiguities and unanswered questions — all unexpectedly uncovered by a 34-year-old curator named Maya Benton. As Benton has discovered, Vishniac released, over the course of a five-decade career, an uncommonly small selection of his work for public consumption — so small, in fact, that it did not include many of his finest images, artistically speaking. Instead the chosen images were, in the main, those that advanced an impression of the shtetl as populated largely by poor, pious, embattled Jews — an impression aided by cropping and fabulist captioning done by his own hand. Vishniac’s curating job was so comprehensive that it would not only limit the appreciation of his talents but also skew the popular conception of pre-Holocaust Jewish life in Europe.

“Closer Reading of Roman Vishniac” Article by ALANA NEWHOUSE for The Times Magazine, New York Times

Seeing is not believing

Ilana Payes — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 10:54:05 +0000

Atheist convention. Coulter’s editorial.

The danger of getting together with like-minded people to pat yourself on the back is that you start thinking you’ve got all the answers, and that everyone who disagrees with you is either mad, bad or both. Fundamentalism, in other words

…

What needs to emerge from this, and hasn’t as yet, is a serious discussion of why some people are atheists and others aren’t. The same evidence is available to every one of us, so why do we reach such radically different conclusions? Such a discussion isn’t going to get everyone agreeing, but it will lead to a much greater understanding and, hopefully, respect.

From “Atheism: the good, the bad and the ugly” MICHAEL COULTER – The Age

something really beautiful…

Ilana Payes — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:05:19 +0000

Minty Marrows

A beautiful animation

by Sam Yang (2008)

music by Amiel Zwier

it is not possible to preclude genuine moral dilemmas

Ilana Payes — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 10:32:29 +0000

Worst Case: Choosing Who Survives in a Flu Epidemic

By SHERI FINK, NEW YORK TIMES

Published: October 24, 2009

New York state health officials recently laid out this wrenching scenario for a small group of medical professionals from New York-Presbyterian Hospital:

A 32-year-old man with cystic fibrosis is rushed to the hospital with appendicitis in the midst of a worsening pandemic caused by the H1N1 flu virus, which has mutated into a more deadly form. The man is awaiting a lung transplant and brought with him the mechanical ventilator that helps him breathe.

New York’s governor has declared a state of emergency and hospitals are following the state’s pandemic ventilator allocation plan — actual guidelines drafted in 2007 that are now being revisited. The plan aims to direct ventilators to those with the best chances of survival in a severe, 1918-like flu pandemic where tens of thousands develop life-threatening pneumonia.

Because the man’s end-stage lung disease caused by his cystic fibrosis is among a list of medical conditions associated with high mortality, the guidelines would bar the man from using a ventilator in a hospital, even though he is, unlike many with his illness, stable, in good condition, and not close to death. If the hospital admits him, the guidelines call for the machine that keeps him alive to be given to someone else.

Would doctors and nurses follow such rules? Should they?

In recent years, officials in a host of states and localities, as well as the federal Veterans Health Administration, have been quietly addressing one of medicine’s most troubling questions: Who should get a chance to survive when the number of severely ill people far exceeds the resources needed to treat them all?

The draft plans vary. In some states, patients with Do Not Resuscitate orders, the elderly, those requiring dialysis, or those with severe neurological impairment would be refused ventilators, or admission to hospitals. Utah divides epidemics into phases. Initially, hospitals would apply triage rules to residents of mental institutions, nursing homes, prisons and facilities for the “handicapped.” If an epidemic worsened, the rules would apply to the general population.

Federal officials say the possibility that America’s already crowded intensive care units would be overwhelmed in the coming weeks by flu patients is small but they remain vigilant.

The triage plans have attracted little publicity. New York, for example, released its draft guidelines in 2007, offered a 45-day comment period, and has made no changes since. The Health Department made 90 pages of public comments public this week only after receiving a request under the state’s public records laws.

Mary Buckley-Davis, a respiratory therapist with 30 years experience, wrote to officials in 2007 that “there will be rioting in the streets” if hospitals begin disconnecting ventilators. “There won’t be enough public relations spin or appropriate media coverage in the world” to calm the family of a patient “terminally weaned” from a ventilator, she said.

State and federal officials defend formal rationing as the last in a series of steps that would be taken to stretch scarce resources and provide the best outcome for the public. They say it is better to plan for such decisions than leave them to besieged health workers battling a crisis.

“You change your perspective from thinking about the individual patient to thinking about the community of patients,” said Rear Adm. Ann Knebel of the Department of Health and Human Services.

But some health professionals question whether the draft guidelines are fair, effective, ethical, and even remotely feasible.

Most existing triage plans were designed for handling mass casualties. They sort injured victims into priority categories based on the urgency of their medical needs and their potential for survival given available resources. Much of the controversy over the state plans focuses on two additional features.

These are “exclusion criteria,” which bar certain categories of patients from standard hospital treatments in a severe health disaster, and “minimum qualifications for survival,” which limit the resources used for each patient. Once that limit is reached, patients who are not improving would be removed from essential treatment in favor of those with better chances.

A version of these concepts was outlined in a post-9/11 medical journal article that suggested ways to handle victims of a large-scale bioterrorist event. The author, Dr. Frederick Burkle Jr., said he based his ideas in part on his experiences as a triage officer in Vietnam and the gulf war and on a cold war-era British plan for coping with a nuclear strike. Dr. Burkle said that during the gulf war he once instructed surgeons to halt an operation and work on another patient who was more likely to survive. Surgeons later returned to the first patient.

Dr. Burkle’s ideas were key aspects of guidelines Ontario authorities drew up after SARS to plan for avian flu and other pandemics. This approach and one by a team of Minnesota doctors were modified by groups developing similar guidelines in the United States.

There were important distinctions. Dr. Burkle’s original paper did not anticipate withdrawing care from patients and stressed the need to reassess the level of supplies “sometimes on a daily or hourly basis” in a fluid effort to provide the best possible care.

Some states’ triage guidelines are rigid, with a single set of criteria intended to apply throughout the severe phase of a pandemic. That disturbs Dr. Burkle. “I have said to my wife, I think I developed a monster here,” he said.

Recent research highlights the problem of a one-size-fits-all approach to triage. Many state pandemic plans call for hospitals to remove patients from ventilators if they are not improving after two to five days. Studies show that people severely ill with H1N1 flu generally need a week to two weeks on ventilators to recover.

There is also controversy over what values and ethical principles should guide triage decisions, how to engage the public, and whether withdrawing life support in the hospital and withholding it at the hospital door are distinct.

Normally, removing viable patients from life support against their or their families’ will would be considered murder. The New York-Presbyterian Hospital employees who participated in the recent exercise said they would not comply unless given legal protection.

They also never figured out what to do with that hypothetical patient who had his own ventilator, said Dr. Kenneth Prager, a pulmonologist and ethicist. “The issue of removing patients from ventilators,” he said, “was so overwhelming that it precluded discussion of further case scenarios.”

Sheri Fink, an M.D., is a staff reporter at ProPublica, the independent nonprofit investigative organization.

Hungry for Knowledge

Ilana Payes — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 11:55:35 +0000

Schools in South Africa are bursting with hopeful students, but the education system often fails those who most need it to escape poverty. Despite last year’s violent episode, students seem to feel genuine affection for their school and speak of their hunger for knowledge and their faith in education to bring a better life.

Sometimes there are those teachers who really, really understand:

Arthur Mgqweto, a math teacher, teaches more than 200 students each day for a salary of $15,000 a year. His students describe him as a friend, a mother, a father, a guide. “He comes early every, every, every day,” Blondie said. “He comes here early at 7 o’clock and he’s the last one to leave. He’s given himself to us.”

Mr. Mgqweto grew up in the countryside during the apartheid years, ashamed to go to school because he had no shoes. He finished high school in his 30s, sitting in class with children half his age. His only son was stabbed to death at age 21 in a nearby township. “I always explain to them, life is very hard,” he said. “They must get educated so they can take care of their families when they grow old.”

His students bake chocolate cakes with him on their birthdays. Dozens come an hour early on weekdays and for Saturday morning sessions with him. He is paid nothing for those extra hours, except in their gratitude. “I love that teacher,” said Olwethu, the student leader. “I love him.”

I highly recommend reading the New York Times articke by CELIA W. DUGGER (here)

Perfect to a fault

Ilana Payes — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 05:49:29 +0000

It was once natural to be shy or have a big nose; now these simple human traits are seen as flaws that need fixing.

John Elder looks at the pursuit of perfection and the narrowing of what it means to be normal… from The Age

WHEN Austin Powers first travelled into the future, he was ridiculed for his stained, crooked teeth. This took him by surprise. The chicks in the swinging ’60s didn’t mind playing tonsil hockey with the international man of mystery because their teeth were usually crooked too, or at least showed some sign of wear.

In fact, 40 or so years ago, if your teeth were perfectly straight and gleaming white, they were presumed to be sad, clackety dentures that you took out at night and stuck in a glass of water or pulled out at parties as a joke.

But cast into the 21st century, the fictional character of Austin Powers – played to such comic effect in the film of the same name by Mike Myers – is the joke. And it’s not just his teeth. His wide-eyed, groovy, overly cheerful persona is repeatedly mocked in the film until he becomes subdued and depressed.

He goofily struggles to fit in with the cool people and otherwise survive the society we now live in, in which an average-sized, quick-shooting penis requires emergency intervention, a medication has been devised to treat the previously unremarked upon crisis of thin eyelashes, and every tattooed child can talk like a jaded therapist and receive pharmacological treatments for their social phobia – a condition we once knew as shyness.

In short, caught in an age in which every small quirk is a crisis that only money can cure, Austin Powers looks in the mirror and for the first time in his horny, happy-go-lucky life sees a maladjusted, dentally challenged freak who needs fixing.

If he’d had any brains at all, Austin would have resigned from his time-travelling, crime-fighting gig, and promptly returned to 1967. Back then, people weren’t routinely referred to a health practitioner for their weak chins, droopy boobs, saggy eyelids, kite-like ears, mottled thighs, distracted, flighty or reserved personalities. In fact, someone like Austin Powers, with a face like a twisted sandshoe, was seen as normal.

Instead, he succumbs to the pressure of modern times, forks out for expensive orthodontal work and routinely apologises for being himself. That is to say, he becomes like the rest of us, desperately trying to fit into a world in which the notion of what is ”normal” has changed to an extent that makes it hard to define, and where much of what we used to think of as being human is now seen as a flaw in need of fixing.

In March this year, Dr Andrew Weil, a US pioneer of integrative medicine, lamented the drug industry’s efforts to ”pathologise everyday human experiences” such as occasional impotence or shyness by giving them serious-sounding names (erectile dysfunction and social anxiety disorder, respectively) so that they could market drugs to combat these ”illnesses”.

He particularly took aim at a new drug, Latisse, approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for marketing as a treatment for thin eyelashes. Like many other drugs, including Viagra, the treatment came about by accident. During tests of a medication for glaucoma, Allergan, the pharmaceutical company best known for Botox, discovered that the medication, Lumigan, had the unexpected side effect of eyelash growth and recognised the potential for a new product. Suddenly, a previously unknown condition (inadequate eyelashes) was born.

Bemoaning the ”drugs for everything” approach, Weil ended his rant with something like a prayer. ”I hope that drugs like this one represent the last gasp of an out-of-control pharmaceutical industry, and that the incoming administration will staff the FDA with officials who understand that not all human imperfections are ‘diseases’ that can or should be addressed with drugs.”

HOW did it come to this? Part of the answer lies in the cheery old saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Perhaps in our efforts to better understand and treat behaviours at the margins of human experience, such as severe mental illness, we have wound up normalising the pathological and pathologising the normal.

”In the past we worked with a very sharp divide between normality and abnormality, and abnormality was defined by the most extreme cases of mental illness,” says Dr Lisa Bortolotti, senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Birmingham. ”Now we are working with the model where normality and abnormality are less sharply divided and situated on a continuum. So even the behaviour of people who are never diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder is described in terms of obsessions, paranoia, phobias.”

One positive outcome of this, Bortolotti says, is that people with mental illness are less stigmatised and their conditions better understood, even by laypeople. But a less positive effect is that the definition of ”normal” has narrowed. So now ”everything that defies expectations, or stands out, is explained in terms of a deviation from an ideal, and may be pathologised”.

The net result has been something of a mass identity crisis, or rather, a widespread crisis of confidence born from the search for an improved sense of self. Dr Brad West, senior lecturer in sociology at Flinders University, says that what is considered normal has changed dramatically over the past 60 years. ”Previously, one’s identity was made through success and achievement within mainstream educational, professional and domestic institutions requiring commitment and regimented discipline. Now there is no one ideal which people readily accept and strive to be integrated within … The desire is for a unique self.”

This shift is what sociologists refer to as ”the therapeutic turn”, which sees every human experience as a potential source of emotional distress requiring professional support, counselling or therapy, rather than ordinary events of human life.

The problem with the emergence of mainstream therapeutic culture, says West, is that it makes people feel powerless and promotes a reliance on medical and psychological expertise. ”We see this new conception of personhood and its associated emphasis on individual vulnerability in a wide variety of new social concerns, from increased parental fears over the risks on the playground to the risk of food and diet,” he says. ”It problematises and pathologises what was once simply a generally accepted divergence from the norm. Such fears are exploited by marketers, with consumerism portrayed as a way individuals can distinguish themselves from others.”

And there is perhaps no better way of making people fearful than to convince them they are sick and in need of curing. While Weil can pray that the drug industry will run out of ridiculous new ideas, Professor Michael Hauskeller, of Exeter University’s Department of Sociology and Philosophy, says fat chance. He argues that as long as there is money to be made, new diseases will be invented.

”What is normal does not require amendment,” Hauskeller says. ”Restoring health … can easily be understood as a moral imperative, whereas going beyond what is normal cannot, or generally is not. Society is more willing to pay for therapy than for enhancement. This means that in order to sell a product it is helpful to blur the line between therapy and enhancement and present the product as curative. This works best when we can point to a certain disease or disorder that the product helps to alleviate, so we invent diseases to match the products we want to sell.”

THIS grubby form of marketing is part of a bigger, grander picture, where the very standing of humanity in relation to all creation is under review. Where humankind loiters today, in terms of a historical crossroad, is as significant as Galileo’s discovery in the 17th century that man wasn’t at the centre of the universe. But thanks to the potential of genetic and pharmaceutical enhancements and engineering, the delusionary power of pop psychology and an overheated, airbrushed celebrity culture (in other words, an overall raising of the bar as to what is normal), humanity is turning on its heels to declare that maybe we are the centre of the universe after all.

There is a complex mix of factors at play here, but they boil down to this: we are caught up in an accelerating pursuit of perfection, and a growing intolerance for imperfection. We may have been made in God’s image, but science and technology reckon they can do better.

”The dream of perfection is apparently as old as humanity, and many people believe that now at last we are about to gain the means to fulfil it. Perfection means getting rid of everything that binds us, which limits us in any way. Liberation from nature,” says Hauskeller.

”There are several philosophers who try to undermine the distinction between therapy and enhancement in order to make the use of technology to create better people appear a moral duty. [They] argue that what is normal depends on the state of our technology. As soon as we are able to prolong people’s lives by, say, 20 years, what used to be a normal human life span no longer is. And not prolonging people’s lives accordingly is tantamount to robbing them of 20 years; that is, killing them 20 years before their time.

”It is interesting to see that those arguments generally rely heavily on certain ideas of what it means to be human. Often mythological figures [such as Prometheus] are evoked to convince readers that it is our human mission to embrace the human enhancement project wholeheartedly.”

One of the philosophers Hauskeller refers to is the Romanian-Australian ethicist and Oxford professor Julian Savulescu, who was introduced by Andrew Denton on Enough Rope last year as ”a man who favours more drugs than sport, who thinks cloning is cool and who says that if the technology were available then, yes, we should genetically modify our children”.

Some consider such positions monstrous. But as Hauskeller explains it, Savulescu’s argument for the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sport is that it is in the human spirit of using reason and all available means to constantly improve ourselves, ”and that we should support this because it is what truly makes us human … what makes us special, what gives us dignity and nobility”.

As much as this might seem fanciful, the seeds of attainable perfection are already sprouting in mainstream consciousness. And again, this is where marketing comes bounding in like a rat with a gold tooth.

Gordon Flett, professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, is co-editor of Perfectionism: Theory, Research, and Treatment, a textbook that treats perfectionism itself as the disease, and a contagious one at that. ”Although there is no empirical data, it does seem that not only is there significant social and cultural pressure to achieve perfection, it seems to have increased,” he says. ”This is certainly something that advertisers have picked up on. There are numerous ads – print and television – in which the need for perfection is incorporated. The worst offenders are cosmetic products where we have perfecting cream … However, for these messages to have an impact, the person must be sensitive and attuned to these cues. They are more likely to have an effect on someone striving for perfection, especially if the striving is based on an overcompensation for feelings of inferiority.”

In recent years, Flett has noticed the development of what he calls perfectionism hotspots, such as Duke University in North Carolina, where the concept of ”effortless perfection” (for women students who felt pressured to achieve academically but also to present well as refined ladies) was espoused until there was a backlash; and Utah, where it is suggested that the need to seem perfect in the Mormon context accounts for the widespread use of antidepressants.

In wider society (where being perfect requires those longer, thicker eyelashes), a more shallow perfectionism is taking root. ”What perfectionism does [is] it limits a basic sense of self-acceptance and acceptance of others,” Flett says. ”It also makes some people so fearful of making mistakes they won’t take chances or do anything that can result in visible mistakes … I want to promote the notion that we should strive to be ‘perfectly human’ and remember that most extreme forms of behaviour are fraught with difficulties for frail humans.”

Let’s go back to Austin Powers’ heyday for a moment. One of the notions to come out of the ’60s was a powerful rebirth of Aristotle’s conviction that wellbeing was to be gained from being the best you could be … with what you were born with. When Muhammad Ali shouted ”I am the greatest”, it was hard to begrudge the sheer joy of a man in his prime. It was fresh, it was real, it was earned – and, as Ali’s sad attempts to keep recapturing the moment attested, it was transitory.

As a cultural moment, however, it may well have been the beginning of a mindset that eventually concluded that being ”the best you can be” meant being second rate. What developed in its place was the crazy idea that you could be anything, anything at all, you want to be. Just dream it, just name it, and it’s yours. Next supermodel? No problem. Best singer in the world? Of course.

Dr Alix Cohen, lecturer in Kantian ethics and philosophy of the social sciences at the University of Leeds, believes the no-talent self-believers on reality TV shows such as Idol, X Factor and So You Think You Can Dance are but purveyors of a kooky logic that is at work in wider society. As she describes it: ”If everyone is entitled to achieving what they desire, and if their abilities are somehow stopping them from doing so, it can’t be because of what they’ve done or haven’t been able to do. Otherwise, it would be their fault and they wouldn’t have anyone to blame for it. So it must be pathological and thus curable through drugs, training or social compensation making up for ‘nature’ letting them down.”

It is a symptom of contemporary culture, she says. ”In the good old days, if you couldn’t speak in public, you simply would pick a job that didn’t demand that, even if it were your dream. But now that everyone is entitled to be what they want to be, everyone has the right to be the perfect version of themselves, and anything that fails them in their attempt to be so becomes a pathology rather than a personal failing they should somehow deal with by re-ordering their preferences.”

And herein lies the true postmodern pathology: the birth of a super race that believes it can fly, even as it drops all the way down into meaningless oblivion.

by John Elder and JENNIFER SHERIDAN

Ilana Payes — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 03:40:02 +0000

This is an embarrassment and an insult to human intelligence.

It is now even more evident that Obama is actually the only hope for such a mindless mob.

Watch this footage (click here).

You’ll laugh. Then cry.

I bleive in God, but I spell it NATURE.

Ilana Payes — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:00:53 +0000

Image provided by NASA, released Sept. 9, 2009, taken by the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope! (click here for images from The Age)

Michael Jackson (i loved you)

Ilana Payes — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 05:00:31 +0000

The first Australian baby born of an Indian surrogate mother.

Ilana Payes — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 06:23:24 +0000

Does it matter where babies come from?

(See prior article “India’s surrogate mother industry” October 13, 2008)

by Sharon Gray, March 16, 2009

Like most two-month-old babies, Luke sleeps a lot, waking only to blink at the world and feed. He does not yet know that according to the Australian High Commission in New Delhi, he is the first Australian baby to be born of an Indian surrogate mother…

His genetic parents Matthew and Rachel longed for a child, but afterfive years of IVF treatments, as well as hypnotherapy, psychotherapy, counselling, Chinese medicine, exploratory laparoscopy, hysteroscopy and other procedures, they finally accepted that conception was not going to happen.

Adoption within Australia is negligible, but inter-country adoption was an option. They completed the required education, passed intensive scrutiny by a social worker and received approval 18 months later, only to be told that they may need to wait up to five years. “It’s a failed system,” says Matthew. “For example, there are about 1000 orphanages in India, but Victoria deals with just five of them. The Attorney- General’s department is currently reviewing the scheme for the second time. Everyone knows it doesn’t work.”

Having been proved unable to carry a child they qualified for surrogacy and began researching via the internet.

The business is thoroughly tried and tested in the United States and the only other countries offering it legally are India and Georgia. “We felt very good about India from several standpoints: education there is outstanding, the country has deep ethical and philosophical roots, people speak English and the economy is surging,” says Matthew. “The best in India is as good, if not better than anything anywhere, especially the hospitals.”

In March 2008 they visited India, first to go to a much publicised clinic in the village of Anand, where two attempts to implant embryos failed.

They then found another clinic in Mumbai and suddenly felt very comfortable. This was a sophisticated set-up catering mainly to Indians on IVF (one million Indian women are on programs) or using surrogates.

The foreign clientele is extremely small, but profitable.

Surrogates are not povertystricken village women. They come from the lower-middle classes, are married with children and remain virtually anonymous to the parents.

Matthew and Rachel left India knowing their surrogate’s pregnancy would be meticulously monitored. For her service the woman received around $10,000, the equivalent of five years’ wages – enough to change her family’s life and educate her children. She does not nurse the infant.”

I was in Aldi buying nappies when I got the call telling me our baby had arrived three weeks early,” says Rachel. “We left for India five days later and met him in the neo-natal clinic of a brand new hospital in Mumbai.” Next came the paperwork necessary to bring baby Luke home to Australia.”

DNA testing had to be done in Australia and the bureaucracy was just incredible.

Australia does not make this easy,” says Rachel, as she cradles her sweet, sleeping son.

In my opinion, words like exploitation don’t seem to apply. Who lost out here? It’s not as if we’re talking about designer clothes and handloomed rugs.

Curator cracks the Dossi code

Ilana Payes — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 12:55:28 +0000

National Gallery of Victoria researchers are now confidant that a mystery painting they’ve held for 43 years is a portrait of Lucrezia Borgia by Italian Renaissance painter Dosso Dossi (circa 1486-1542).

Read article

Obama’s Use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy

Ilana Payes — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:51:10 +0000

In the first two weeks since the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the past eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say.

“Talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can’t really do there, I think needing to do that isn’t tapping into what Americans are needing also,” she said.

Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama’s appearance on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday witnessed the president-elect’s unorthodox verbal tic, which had Mr. Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually every time he opened his mouth.

But Mr. Obama’s decision to use complete sentences in his public pronouncements carries with it certain risks, since after the last eight years many Americans may find his odd speaking style jarring.

According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it “alienating” to have a president who speaks English as if it were his first language.

“Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement,” says Mr. Logsdon. “If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist.”

The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, “Okay, subject, predicate, subject predicate — we get it, stop showing off.”

The president-elect’s stubborn insistence on using complete sentences has already attracted a rebuke from one of his harshest critics, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.

Andy Borowitz is a comedian and writer whose work appears in The New Yorker and The New York Times, and at his award-winning humor site, BorowitzReport.com.

Goodbye Mama Africa

Ilana Payes — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 11:41:32 +0000

Miriam Makeba, 76, Singer and Activist, Dies

(r ead more here)

singing with Paul Simon

OBAMA: Young, handsome and “suntanned” OMG!

Ilana Payes — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 11:58:09 +0000

“Mr. Berlusconi’s stupid joke is a further demonstration of the racism and intolerance that grow inside Italian population, helped by the embarrassing attitude of Italian politics.”

Many Italians reacted with incredulity and outrage after Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi called the first African-American president-elect in United States history “young, handsome and suntanned.”

Mr. Berlusconi made the remark while meeting President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia, saying that Senator Barack Obama’s good looks, his youth and his so-called suntan were “all the qualities” for Mr. Medvedev and the future president to “develop a good working relationship.”

Many Italian newspapers gave the comment nearly as much front-page attention as Mr. Obama’s victory itself. The journalist Curzio Maltese wrote in the center-left La Repubblica that “bookmakers wouldn’t even take bets” on how long it would take for Mr. Berlusconi to let slip another of his famous gaffes. “Mr. Berlusconi never fails to live up to our worst expectations.”

From: “Obama Joke by Premier Has Italy in an Uproar” Read NewYorkTimes article here

’nuff said!

Ilana Payes — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 14:35:35 +0000

la musica è finita: The end of the Australian National Academy of Music

Ilana Payes — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 09:19:54 +0000

The federal government announced that they will not be funding the Australian National Academy of Music in 2009.

“Australia’s young elite music talent deserves the best possible training in order to flourish in what is a fiercely competitive field.” Alex Millier, Principal Bass Clarinet, West Australian Symphony Orchestra (read letter)

Dear Rosner…

Ilana Payes — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 10:40:01 +0000

“There’s a tune called ‘Yiddishe Momme’ – ‘Jewish Mother’. It’s a very popular tune of family life. The words are very touching words, [they] make [a] lot of people cry.” LEO ROSNER

Musician Leo Rosner saved by Schindler dies at 90,

Jewish News article here

Tonight I opened last week’s Jewish News paper and saw that Leo Rosner had died. When my mother realised my eyes had welled with tears she said, “Did you think that generation would live forever?”. “No, of course not, but I always thought he might play at my wedding”…

Venice 2005, I remember watching Schindler’s List dubbed in Italian. I’d seen it before in English, but this time I cried most at the end when I recognised Leo Rosner. When the Jewish Museum housed an exhibition of Jewish Music, I saw Rosner’s accordion, with an inscription reading that it was this actual artifact that saved his life. I’d heard him play his piano accordion many times but the night of this particular Jewish Museum exhibition left an impression hard to shake. He played to the tune of Mein Yiddishe Momma. And Whilst everyone was singing or clapping, i was lost in a picture of what his life might have looked like before the war. I saw his mother sitting there, watching proudly as her children played the accordion, piano, violin…

Leo Rosner interviewed on George Negus Tonight

Transcripts Leo Rosner: Broadcast 6.30pm on 12/07/2004

On his wedding night in 1943, Leo Rosner was taken to a Nazi labour camp in Poland, run by commandant Amon Goeth. Rosner, an accordionist, credits his instrument with saving his life. He had to perform for Goeth on numerous occasions. Eventually the German industrialist Oscar Schindler took in Leo as a ‘house musician’. Leo figures prominently in the book Schindler’s Ark, and is the accordionist depicted in the movie Schindler’s List.
Leo and his wife made their way to Melbourne, after the war, and with a repertoire of fifty-thousand tunes Leo says he can keep people of any background entertained.

GEORGE NEGUS: Tonight, keeping the music alive. What a nice idea. From the dubious perpetrators of the equally dubious punk rock to a backroom boy of the famous Motown sound. And we’ll even discover how one muso’s music actually saved him from the Nazis. G’day again. Back in the office after a fantastic week wandering about the Top End. Thanks for that, Mr and Mrs Taxpayer. Seriously, hope you came away from last week’s Indigenous specials thinking you got your money’s worth. Tonight, though, something entirely different – a look back at some different music genres. Do they help us define our history or are they merely reacting to it? Either way, there have always been tunes that evoked particular periods. Our personal historical soundtracks, if you like. Take Leo Rosner. Over the years, Leo, a Melbourne Jewish musician, has gained a reputation for coming up with the right tune for just about any event or occasion.

LEO ROSNER, MUSICIAN: I play any kind of tunes. When I am playing for Greeks, I play Greek music. They think that I am Greek. I play for Hungarians, I play Hungarian music. They even speak to me Hungarian. I can’t speak Hungarian.

ANNA ROSNER BLAY, DAUGHTER: My father’s really a showman. He loves an audience, he loves to entertain people and to be appreciated.

FRANCES SONDHEIM, DAUGHTER: You speak of Leo Rosner, I mean, immediately, they smile and they think of their own wedding, their children’s wedding, their children’s bar mitzvah.

LEO ROSNER: I come from a large musical family. My father was a violinist. He was self-taught, you know. And my eldest brother was a great violinist. Second-eldest brother was a pianist and composer of some well-known tunes. I played for many years before the war. And that saved my life. I met my wife Helen in ghetto. We decided to get married. On the night of the wedding, I was taken to concentration camp for honeymoon, alone. And after a few days, she came to the same camp. Amon Goeth, the camp commandant, he was unpredictable, you know. Everybody was trembling just looking at him.

(EXCERPT FROM ‘SCHINDLER’S LIST’)

LEO ROSNER: I don’t think that Ralph Fiennes was good as Amon Goeth. He tried to imitate him but couldn’t copy him. They found out that I am a musician. And one day, “Leo Rosner to Kommandant.” I was with my brother also, with the great violinists. On one of those parties, we met Oscar Schindler. He come to me, he put arm around me, he say, “Rosner, don’t worry. Everything will be alright.” Liam Neeson was quite good playing Oscar Schindler. Very similar.

ANNA ROSNER BLAY: By the end of the war, my father had managed to survive with a few of his relatives because of Schindler knowing him and being on the list.

LEO ROSNER: I came to Australia in 1949. And I met a well-known musician of Australia, Dennis Farrington.

MAN: Well, it was really a great day when Leo appeared on the scene. Someone would come out who’d be current, and I’d say, “Leo, I’ve got to do this. What can we do?” Bang. He’d get to work. He’s written it down in a minute. All our bands would be playing.

LEO ROSNER: Dennis, he helped me a lot. When I started, I played 90% of Jewish weddings. And I had a name that where I played there was no divorce. And one person spoiled my name. I played a wedding of one rabbi. He divorced. (Laughs)

ANNA ROSNER BLAY: I didn’t know anything about my parents’ past except I knew they’d been in the war. When Tom Keneally wrote the book ‘Schindler’s Ark’, I discovered this whole chapter in my parents’ lives that I knew nothing about and I started to become very curious. My father was very happy to then talk about his experiences but my mother still was quite reluctant. She found it difficult to deal with her past.

FRANCES SONDHEIM: I think that Jewish music was most important for people after the war because they lost so much during the war.

LEO ROSNER: There’s a tune called ‘Yiddishe Momme’ – ‘Jewish Mother’. It’s a very popular tune of family life. The words are very touching words, make lot of people cry.

ANNA ROSNER BLAY: I’m not sure that he sees his own playing as a way of recovering from his experiences but it was just something that was part of his life. That was just the way he would make his entrance into any situation, was via his music.

FRANCES SONDHEIM: There’s no doubt about it, he shines and he smiles and it’s a wonderful feeling for everybody. And he knows so many songs, he can play whatever you want.

LEO ROSNER: My favourite tune is ‘God Save the Queen’ because it’s the last number when I go home. (Laughs)

GEORGE NEGUS: In Leo’s case, maybe that should be ‘God Save the Piano Accordion’, his good old squeezebox.

UN’s first “Global Handwashing Day”

Ilana Payes — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 11:33:39 +0000

As part of the United Nation’s International Year of Sanitation, more than 120 million children across South Asia are to simultaneously wash their hands. The UN’s message is that sanitation routines such as hand washing with soap is one of the most effective ways of preventing diseases responsible for the deaths of million’s of children each year.

Millions mark UN hand-washing day

Hand Washing: So Important, It Gets a Day Of Its Own

Wednesday is Global Handwashing Day, an event designed to promote the use of soap in developing countries. Transcript of radio broadcast:
14 October 20

Wednesday, October fifteenth, is the first Global Handwashing Day. Activities are planned in more than twenty countries to get millions of people in the developing world to wash their hands with soap.

For example, private donors will give one hundred fifty thousand bars of soap to schools in Ethiopia. The Education Ministry wants one million schoolchildren to wash their hands for Wednesday’s event.

Experts say people around the world wash their hands but very few use soap at so-called critical moments. These include after using the toilet, after cleaning a baby and before touching food.

Global Handwashing Day is the idea of the Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing with Soap. Partners include the United Nations Children’s Fund, American government agencies, the World Bank and soap makers Unilever and Procter and Gamble. The goal, they say, is to create a culture of hand washing with soap.

The organizers say all soaps are equally effective at removing disease-causing germs. They say the correct way to wash is to wet your hands with a small amount of water and cover them with soap. Rub it into all areas, including under the fingernails. Rub for at least twenty seconds.

Then, rinse well under running water. Finally, dry your hands with a clean cloth or wave them in the air.

The Partnership for Handwashing says soap is important because it increases the time that people spend washing. Soap also helps to break up the grease and dirt that hold most of the germs. And it usually leaves a pleasant smell, which increases the likelihood that people will wash again.

The partnership says washing with soap before eating and after using the toilet could save more lives than any vaccine or medicine. It could help reduce cases of diarrhea by almost half. And it could reduce deaths from pneumonia and other breathing infections by one-fourth.

Diarrhea is the second leading cause of child deaths, killing more than one and a half million children a year. Pneumonia is the leading cause, killing about two million children under five each year. Hand washing can also prevent the spread of other diseases.

When people get germs on their hands, they can infect themselves by touching their eyes, nose or mouth. Then they can infect others.

And that’s the VOA Special English Health Report, written by Caty Weaver. For a link to a Handwashing Handbook in English, Spanish, French and Swahili, go to voaspecialenglish.com. I’m Steve Ember.

India’s surrogate mother industry

Ilana Payes — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:33:00 +0000

In a country with one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world….

painting by mary ann rock

India has drafted guidelines giving women the right to a fee for surrogacy…(surrogacy is still illegal in many countries). Having a baby at the Rotunda clinic in Mumbai costs around £13,000 (US$22,400). Each surrogate is paid between £2,500 and £3,500 (supposedly the equivalent of 10 years salary for some of these women).

“India’s surrogate mother industry” by Poonam Taneja, BBC News, Anand, Gujarat

Their place at the pinnacle of sophistication —

Ilana Payes — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 11:36:14 +0000

David Marr (The Sydney Morning Herald) launches his new book The Henson Case, about the public outcry over an exhibition of images of naked adolescents by the photographer Bill Henson at Paddington’s Roslyn Oxley9 gallery, in May, which was subsequently raided by police

Photos, audio: David Marr on what the Bill Henson controversy revealed about Australia.