Miriam Makeba, 76, Singer and Activist, Dies (read more here)

singing with Paul Simon

“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

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)

“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.

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.

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.

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

see also “Mother for only nine months” by Sunita Thakur, Anand, Gujarat

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.

Highest maternal mortality in the world in Northeastern Afghanistan

For almost 16 babies born, one woman will die in labour. As a country, Afghanistan is ranked second in the world for maternal mortality rates after Sierra Leone. But health professionals in the province are optimistic that a new project is reducing the numbers of deaths.

A midwife trainee programme, run by the Aga Khan Health Services, selects bright young women from districts across the province. The students take an 18 month course in the provincial capital, Fayzabad, before returning to their villages as trained midwives. About 50 women have graduated from the programme since it started in 2005 – Article by Martin Patience BBC News, Badakshan, northern Afghanistan, 4 October 2008

see also ReliefWeb and World Food Programme (WFP)

In the “post a comment” words of… whoever mad05963 is:

Ladies and gentlemen, the future Vice President of the United States. here

In my name website here

Be the generation to end poverty

In countries where the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are on track, people are living with new hope to escape poverty. But while some progress has been made, many governments have fallen disgracefully behind schedule. Rich countries are back-tracking on their aid promises and poor countries are not investing enough in education and health care which is undermining people’s fundamental rights.

If things continue as they are, none of the MDGs will be fully met by the 2015. What we need is immediate and sustained action by nations, both rich and poor together. In My Name is a global call to action against poverty and demand world leaders keep their promises on millennium development goals.

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1To express reservations about her qualifications to be vice president — and possibly president — is to risk being labeled anti-woman— in Kathleen Parker’s “Palin Problem’

Palin Problem
She’s out of her league.
By Kathleen Parker

If at one time women were considered heretical for swimming upstream against feminist orthodoxy, they now face condemnation for swimming downstream — away from Sarah Palin.

To express reservations about her qualifications to be vice president — and possibly president — is to risk being labeled anti-woman.
Or, as I am guilty of charging her early critics, supporting only a certain kind of woman.

Some of the passionately feminist critics of Palin who attacked her personally deserved some of the backlash they received. But circumstances have changed since Palin was introduced as just a hockey mom with lipstick — what a difference a financial crisis makes — and a more complicated picture has emerged.

As we’ve seen and heard more from John McCain’s running mate, it is increasingly clear that Palin is a problem. Quick study or not, she doesn’t know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin should conditions warrant her promotion.

Yes, she recently met and turned several heads of state as the United Nations General Assembly convened in New York. She was gracious, charming and disarming. Men swooned. Pakistan’s president wanted to hug her. (Perhaps Osama bin Laden is dying to meet her?)

And, yes, she has common sense, something we value. And she’s had executive experience as a mayor and a governor, though of relatively small constituencies (about 6,000 and 680,000, respectively).

Finally, Palin’s narrative is fun, inspiring and all-American in that frontier way we seem to admire. When Palin first emerged as John McCain’s running mate, I confess I was delighted. She was the antithesis and nemesis of the hirsute, Birkenstock-wearing sisterhood — a refreshing feminist of a different order who personified the modern successful working mother.

Palin didn’t make a mess cracking the glass ceiling. She simply glided through it.

It was fun while it lasted.

Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.

No one hates saying that more than I do. Like so many women, I’ve been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I’ve also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted.

Palin filibusters. She repeats words, filling space with deadwood. Cut the verbiage and there’s not much content there. Here’s but one example of many from her interview with Hannity: “Well, there is a danger in allowing some obsessive partisanship to get into the issue that we’re talking about today. And that’s something that John McCain, too, his track record, proving that he can work both sides of the aisle, he can surpass the partisanship that must be surpassed to deal with an issue like this.”

When Couric pointed to polls showing that the financial crisis had boosted Obama’s numbers, Palin blustered wordily: “I’m not looking at poll numbers. What I think Americans at the end of the day are going to be able to go back and look at track records and see who’s more apt to be talking about solutions and wishing for and hoping for solutions for some opportunity to change, and who’s actually done it?”

If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.

If Palin were a man, we’d all be guffawing, just as we do every time Joe Biden tickles the back of his throat with his toes. But because she’s a woman — and the first ever on a Republican presidential ticket — we are reluctant to say what is painfully true.

What to do?

McCain can’t repudiate his choice for running mate. He not only risks the wrath of the GOP’s unforgiving base, but he invites others to second-guess his executive decision-making ability. Barack Obama faces the same problem with Biden.

Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first.

Do it for your country. — Kathleen Parker is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Fractured  Fairytale Snow  White meets Rapunzel 1137

138

Research, please forgive us. Our relationship with you is clearly dysfunctional. We proclaim to the world how much we care about you, yet we fail to treat you with the respect you deserve. We value you conditionally, listening only when you tell us what we want to hear. We sneak behind your back even while basking in the glow of your reputation. If you don’t leave us, it must be because you’re blind – maybe even double-blind – to our faults.

Alfie Kohn, 2006 “Abusing Research: The Study of Homework and Other Examples”

see also,

Education’s Rotten Apples

by Alfie Kohn

But what if something that works to accomplish one goal ends up impeding another? And what if two very different strategies are inversely related, such that they work at cross purposes? As it happens, converging evidence from different educational arenas tends to support exactly these concerns. Particularly when practices that might be called, for lack of better labels, progressive and traditional are used at the same time, the latter often has the effect of undermining the former.

Example 1 comes from the world of math instruction. A few years back, a researcher named Michelle Perry published a study in the journal Cognitive Development that looked at different ways of teaching children the concept of equivalence, as expressed in problems such as “4 + 6 + 9 = ___ + 9.” Fourth and 5th graders, none of whom knew how to solve such problems, were divided into two groups. Some were taught the underlying principle (”The goal of a problem like this is to find …”), while others were given step-by-step instructions (”Add up all the numbers on the left side, and then subtract the number on the right side”).

Both approaches were effective at helping students solve problems just like the initial one. Consistent with other research, however, the principle-based approach was much better at helping them transfer their knowledge to a slightly different kind of problem—for example, multiplying and dividing numbers to reach equivalence. Direct instruction of a technique for getting the right answer produced shallow learning.

But why not do both? What if students were taught the procedure and the principle? Here’s where it gets interesting. Regardless of the order in which these two kinds of instruction were presented, students who were taught both ways didn’t do any better on the transfer problems than did those who were taught only the procedure—which means they did far worse than students who were taught only the principle. Teaching for understanding didn’t offset the destructive effects of telling them how to get the answer. Any step-by- step instruction in how to solve such problems put learners at a disadvantage; the absence of such instruction was required for them to understand.

Example 2 has to do with how learning is evaluated. In a study that appeared in the British Journal of Educational Psychology, Ruth Butler took 5th and 6th graders, including both high- and low-achieving students, and asked them to work on some word-construction and creative-thinking tasks. One-third of them then received feedback in narrative form, one- third received grades for their performance, and one-third received both comments and grades.

The first finding: Irrespective of how well they had been doing in school, students were subsequently less successful at the tasks, and also reported less interest in those tasks, if they received a grade rather than narrative feedback. Other research has produced the same result: Grades almost always have a detrimental effect on how well students learn and how interested they are in the topic they’re learning.

But because Ms. Butler had thought to include a third experimental condition—grades plus comments—she was able to document that the negative effects of grading, on both performance and interest, were not mitigated by the addition of a comment. In fact, with the task that required more original thinking, the students’ performance was highest with comments, lower with grades, and lowest of all with both. These differences were all statistically significant, and they applied to high- and low-achieving students alike. As in Michelle Perry’s math study, the more traditional practice not only didn’t help, but actually wiped out the positive effects of the alternative strategy.

One recalls the bit of folk wisdom—confirmed by generations of farmers and grocers—warning that a rotten apple can spoil a barrel full of good apples. It would be pushing things to postulate a kind of educational ethylene released by traditional classroom practices, analogous to the gas given off by bad fruit. But it does seem that the quest for optimal results may sometimes require us to abandon certain practices rather than simply piling other, better practices on top of them.

In other instances, too, the rotten-apple theory offers a better fit with educational reality than does “the more, the merrier.” Consider schools that try to have it both ways: They work with students who act inappropriately, perhaps even spending time to promote conflict-resolution strategies—but they still haven’t let go of heavy-handed policies that amount to doing things to students to get compliance. On the one hand: “We’re a caring community, committed to solving problems together.” On the other hand: “If you do something that displeases us (the people with the power), we’ll make you suffer to teach you a lesson.”

What might explain these mixed messages? Sometimes a school is in transition, grasping for something better but still holding on to old-fashioned control until everyone becomes sufficiently confident about the new approach to let go of the old. Sometimes a theory even more optimistic than “the more, the merrier” is at work: an “antidote” model that assumes the bad will be detoxified by the good. I haven’t seen any hard data one way or the other on this question, but plenty of anecdotal evidence suggests that some schools wind up taking away with one hand what they’ve given with the other. A peer-mediation program is nice, but its potential to do good is limited if kids are still subject to detentions, suspensions, rewards for obedience, and so on. As a principal in Connecticut observed, after describing her school’s struggle to create a more positive climate, “Our original goals were to control student behavior and build community, but along the way we learned that these are conflicting goals.” Only when the “doing to” is gone can the “working with” really begin to make some headway.

That smell of good apples going bad also issues from classrooms that try to combine collaboration and competition—for example, by putting students into groups but then setting the groups against one another. The reason for cooperative learning, students infer, is to defeat another bunch of students learning together. Cooperation becomes merely instrumental, the goal being to triumph over others.

Or consider a teacher who does all the right things to help kids love reading: surrounds them with good books and offers plenty of time to read them; gives kids choices about what to read and how to respond to what they’ve read; teaches them to read from the beginning through rich stories and other authentic material, with a focus on meaning rather than just on decoding skills. Sometimes, however, those ingredients of literacy are soured by the simultaneous use of reading incentives—either home-grown schemes or slick prefabricated programs (bought with precious book-acquisition funds)—that lead children to regard reading as a tedious prerequisite to receiving points and prizes. It’s hard to treat kids like budding bibliophiles when they’re also being treated like pets.

Underlying this last example, as well as Ruth Butler’s grading study and perhaps even the tension between problem-solving and discipline, is the deeper issue of motivation to learn. Or maybe we should say motivations to learn, because the point is that there are qualitatively different kinds. One of psychology’s most robust findings is that extrinsic motivation (doing something in order to receive a reward or avoid a punishment) is completely different from—and often inversely related to—intrinsic motivation (doing something for its own sake). The more we offer rewards to “motivate” people, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.

Some behaviorists have tried to challenge the growing evidence supporting that contention, but the latest major research review—see Psychological Bulletin, vol. 125 (1999): 627-68—dispels any lingering doubt about a finding that has by now held up across genders, ages, cultures, settings, and tasks: Two kinds of motivation simply are not better than one. Rather, one (extrinsic) is corrosive of the other (intrinsic)—and intrinsic is the one that counts. To make a difference, therefore, we have to subtract grades, not just add a narrative report. We have to eliminate incentives, not just promote literacy. We have to remove coercive discipline policies, not just build a caring community.

These days, with our attention riveted on the Tougher Standards version of school reform as on a slow-motion train wreck, we may, if we look very carefully, notice another illustration of the rotten-apple phenomenon playing out before our eyes. Top- down demands to raise scores on bad tests are terrible and ought to be vigorously opposed. But what about top-down demands to raise scores on reasonably good tests? What happens when states offer performance-based assessments, but in the context of “accountability” systems—basically, extrinsic pressure—to improve the results?

In a word, the former are destroyed by the latter. Exhibit A is the Kentucky Education Reform Act, rolled out in the early 1990s, which proposed to let students show what they understood rather than just memorizing facts and bubbling in ovals. Unfortunately, their performance triggered a series of rewards and penalties for educators, and schools quickly became pressure cookers. With so much riding on the outcome, technical concerns about reliability came to overshadow pedagogical concerns about improving learning.

Before the decade was out, the best features of the experiment had been dismantled, with conventional tests replacing richer measures. “High-stakes accountability and performance assessment are based on conflicting principles,” as Ken Jones and Betty Lou Whitford observed in their summary of the state’s reform. “One encourages conformity to externally imposed standards, while the other grows out of emergent interaction between teachers and students.”

Exhibit B is the Maryland State Performance Assessment Program, or MSPAP, a system begun around the same time as Kentucky’s that has more recently met the same sad fate. It featured open-ended questions and authentic tasks to measure critical thinking, but it, too, was married to high stakes: Schools were publicly ranked, with bonuses for the high scorers and humiliation and threats for the low. Again, the quality of the assessment couldn’t protect students and teachers from the toxic effects of what now passes for “accountability”: The curriculum was narrowed to focus on MSPAP questions (for example, more structured writing, less creative writing), students had to memorize catchy formulas for producing high-scoring essays, and schools were set against each other in a mutually destructive competition. High-stakes meant high-stress for high-and low-performing schools alike.

The death of the MSPAP had other causes, too: relentless opposition from conservatives (whose counterparts in California and Arizona had also succeeded in halting short-lived experiments with authenticity); pressure to chart the results of individual students, rather than sample their performance so as to monitor schools; and concerns about reliability and errors in scoring prompted by lower scores than expected in affluent areas this past spring.

These factors aside, though, there are two central lessons to be drawn from Maryland and Kentucky:

1. Even when the assessment is performance-based, teaching to the test is (a) possible, (b) undesirable, and (c) done pervasively (indeed, frantically).
2. Analogous to the economic principle known as Gresham’s Law, bad tests will drive out good tests in a high-stakes environment. The current accountability fad—which was launched for political, not educational, reasons—inexorably dumbs down assessment. It leaves us with the sort of conventional standardized tests that are more consistent with the purposes of rating and ranking, bribing and threatening.

Then again, we may be witnessing something that transcends the challenges of assessment, a macro echo of a phenomenon confirmed at the micro level: The bad stuff has to be eliminated for the good stuff to work.

BBC journalist Christine Jeavans is giving up plastic for the whole of August. She will not be buying or accepting anything which contains plastic or is packaged in plastic.

Before the challenge, Jeavans collected a month’s worth of my plastic waste, which amounted to 603 items! England alone throws away 58 billion items - 1.5 million tonnes - of household plastic packaging a year, according to the government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap) and it’s growing annually by 2-5%.

Plastic waste

Jeavans writes that the “Durable, versatile, lightweight, hygienic, cheap and strong: synthetic plastic is arguably one of the most useful inventions of the last century… It is essential in medical equipment, technology and thousands of devices which have increased our standard of living…. But those very same attributes of durability and cheapness make plastic one of the most pervasive forms of waste on the planet.”

Keep up with her blog here.

Also visit Matt Harding’s website here

I wonder why, I wonder why,

I wonder why I wonder;

I wonder why, I wonder why

I wonder why I wonder!

~Richard Feynman

When I was a child I loved being read to, but I never really read alone. I only ever remember reading Dr. Seuss books, because I knew them by heart. In grade four I went to a new school. I wore large red glasses to match my enormous, irregular handwriting. During our weekly creative writing classes, I made elaborately decorated hand bound books. Sometimes I attempt a title, but never more; the pages were always blank.

One day, in grade four, the school took us to a traveling exhibition at the Arts Center, its theme was The Wizard of Oz, which, coincidently, was my most beloved story in my entire nine-year-old world. At the gift shop (exhibitions always end with a gift shop) I spied a book I’d never seen, it documented the making of the Oz stage and film productions, and contained an illustrated history of the author. After noticing how intently I was eyeing the book, my teacher offered, without hesitation, to buy it for me as a gift, with the condition that I read it—and by read it she meant the words. Excitedly I gave my word, and I’ve had the book ever since.    One day I hope to read it.

During his (2005) Retrospective at the NGV, I met his Melbourne representative. She walked me through the gallery which exhibited his latest work. Pointing to a portrait of a freckled girl with sad eyes and pouting lips, she declared “This is his new model… isn’t she sublime!”. Then a group of school children marched through the gallery… part of their government funded “art education”.

When speaking to Henson some years back at a Gareth Sansom exhibition, I asked where he finds his models— Paris mostly, he replied. My decision to write a thesis on “the sexualisation of children in art” was motivated mostly by Henson’s photographs of children. Either he’s a pervert, an issues the art world have been tippy-toeing around for years, or he’s using children for its very effective, media grabbing “shock value”.

I do admire his photographs. His Paris Opera series, his crowds, even some portraits, I think these are magnificent. His brooding landscapes are moving and poetic. But his nude children—well, they’re nude children.

1. Henson’s photographs, 2. random porn site photo, 3. porn image Photo shopped

Take away the back lighting and dark backdrops of his night scenes, we can easily compare the images with those found on a cheap porn-site (see my Photoshop example above).

Portraying seductive, naked girls on the brink of puberty was OK in the sixteenth century, but today, it’s obscene–in legal terms at least. Contemporary art tries feverously to push limits, searching for the most shocking, wrong, or ugly. Henson’s photographs have been pushing the limits of Australia’s obscenity and child pornography laws for decades, whilst concurrently representing Australia at the 46th Venice Biennale, in our National galleries, publishing three photographic books… putting Australian art on the map. The question on everyone’s lips is “why now?”.

It’s probably the same tired Emperor’s new cloak?…. if the national Gallery says it’s art, then it’s art. If it sells for tens of thousands of dollars, then it’s art. But when the PM and Federal Police claim that “the Emperor is in fact naked” … well, what then?

Nothing, other than a quick promotion to “controversial art” … more exposure for the artist, more money for the galleries.

Yinxing Township Central Primary School,

Safe for the first time